Decision Making: Weighing Advantages And Disadvantages

Life is full of difficult decisions for us to make, and no matter how simple we try to make our lives, how many self help books or articles we read, how much we try to learn from other people’s experience, …etc; we always end up confronted with a hard decision to take. There simply is no escaping it.

Taking decisions is a complicated process, and so many things come into play. We first have this gut feeling generated by our adaptive unconscious, some of us follow it, and some of us hesitate and need to think more, sort things out “rationally” and then take their decision.
This isn’t always good, although it seems it is, as we sometimes over-complicate things for ourselves, but well…

So we basically sit around thinking about what options we have, breaking them down to bits and pieces and weighing them to find the perfect decision.

The problem is there is often no such thing as a perfect decision or option in life.
In fact, generally speaking, there is no such thing as anything being perfect in life.
Everything has its advantages and disadvantages, its positives and negatives, and the only thing we can actually do is sort them and choose the option that has advantages that are worth the disadvantages we’re going to suffer.

Everyday we are faced with these kinds of decisions, at work, at home, at the doctor’s office, at the mall, everywhere.
Almost every thought-out decision of ours results from us putting the positives and negatives in a balance.

But still we end up taking wrong decisions, because sometimes we think we want certain things that we actually don’t want, or think we don’t need certain things that are actually very crucial to us. This explains why we hope we could undo some of our decisions.

There is no solution that will guarantee our decisions to be the right ones everytime, in fact I also think there is no such thing as a right decision, it’s all relative, and what one person thinks is the right decision, could not be quite right for another, but well in the end we’ll sometimes have to trust our instincts, in other times take a more logical approach, and generally we should try to get to know ourselves better to know what it is that really makes us happy and what we truly need, so that we have a reference to go back to when it’s decision time.