Some people agonize for days, weeks, months, even years, getting to one side or the other of an important decision. For some, even mundane choices like which restaurant to go to for dinner or which brand of item to choose from among five similar items can be time-consuming and painful to make. Consider these three facts about procrastination and hopefully, just hopefully, allow yourself the opportunity to enjoy quicker decision-making for a welcome change!
Moaning, turning and wallowing.
When you start to realize that your friends or family aren’t crazy about being around you for a long time, think about it, you may be burning them out with your constant wallowing in the same item over and over and over again. It’s cute once or twice, heck, you might get spoiled one more time, but that’s it! For now.
When you can never make a decision in a timely manner, you start to burden people who have to listen to your constant turmoil. Evasion is established as a tool provided by nature to protect yourself from those who will kill you for your own anxieties. The reality is; even after the twenty-seventh time of going round and round, the day’s decision is finally made, it has no better odds of success than it did on the first day.
The feasibility of any decision or choice made on the first day or the nth day is, at best, 50% success and the rest failure. The question turns; Where will your decision fall when you finally make it? That depends on three factors: execution, perseverance (tenacity) and time. Note that the last factor will negatively affect you if you falter, even if you end up getting the right choice.
Indecision is the number one time thief!
The old adage “time is money” will never fully retire from the English language because it turns out that it’s actually true. The United States is a prime example filled with people who literally made a fortune or changed lives because they didn’t wait for evidence of the viability of their decisions. Most successful business leaders (indeed, great leaders in general) could be described in one word: courageous.
Steve Jobs had no engineering background, no college education to boast of, no prior business background, no last name, and no wealth to go by, but he had plenty of what some might call “reckless” decision-making, aka just jumping . in. It’s now a household name based largely on his guts. Now, do I mean that we have to be stupid when making important decisions in our lives? Of course, no! but what does that have to do with waiting over and over again for a choice you inevitably have to make anyway? Carefully consider your options to the best of your ability and make your choice and let time work in your favor. You’re better off spending your worry time making sure you execute your decision well. You will have controlled at least two of the factors that will increase the chances of your final result reaching the success percentile!
Regression and regret.
Nothing in life is a safe bet but indecision is a guarantee of regrets. It hurts when someone runs in with an idea that maybe you had first and turns it into a big hit. You think of ways you could have done it maybe better if you had, but now it’s out of your hands and the best you can hope for is for the second person to do it.
The downside of missed opportunity-based regrets is that you become even more regressive. Life in the end, even for the most successful, is the sum total of all the decisions made. Some decisions will fail no matter how well-intentioned they may be, but others will succeed. The differentiator becomes the ratio between successful decisions made and failed ones.
Always remember that the success of your final pick has less to do with the number of times you flipped and more to do with execution, tenacity and timing. Should I really repeat this again? I’ll save you the agony.
conclusion
Do you have difficulty making decisions in a timely manner? Are you anxious when making decisions and this article makes sense to you? If you would like to share your own experience and thoughts, please email me or your circle of friends, let me know how we can expand this conversation. It would be great to have a less anxious citizen of the world, freed from the fear of the unknown “wrong decision.”