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| Decision making, can be a balancing act. |
I am thankful for new ideas.
Yesterday, I was talking with Theo who was having a problem moving forward from something he was working on. We talked a bit to understand the problem and how it might be solved. Then I told him about something I learned when I was his age.
I was working in my first real job for a large corporation and at the time, the company had one its most successful presidents ever. I read an interview with the president about his managing strategies and one point of the interview struck me more than all the others. He said the most important thing was to make a decision. Any decision. Even if it's wrong, it moves moves things forward. You hope it's a good one, but if it's not, you learn from it and move on.
In my inexperienced, idealist mind, that was a new and somewhat outlandish idea for me. I thought you always had to make the right decision. And if you weren't sure, you had to study the issue more until you were convinced you were right. (Or as right as you could be in an imperfect world.) Of course, that meant that sometimes, I didn't do anything and nothing progressed. So this idea of just making a decision was very profound to me.
Now, it seems so obvious. I will never know every variable to make a perfect decision. I just have to do the best I can and move on. If I'm perfectly honest, I still struggle with making most decisions, but I move forward much faster than I used to. And as the years go by, it gets easier and easier.
So for the idea I learned from my company's president and all the others along the way, I am thankful.
(So did this story help Theo? Well, he's thinking about it. Time will tell.)
