I was talking to Owen, a good friend of mine who does street magic, you might have seen him in Covent Garden before (check out www.roadmage.com), and we were discussing the whole topic of decision making and from that discussion I wanted to share the idea of the maze.
So basically Owen is in a pickle about making a particular decision which is quite difficult. We’ve all been there before, where you have a choice to do one thing or another and you just not sure which path to take.
Often you can get wrapped up in thought over it for days, weeks, even months and even end up in a sort of stalemate with your own unconscious mind.
As we chatted, I was reminded of a talk I gave at the London 4 Hour Work Week Meetup (http://www.4hourworkweek.co.uk/) where afterwards a member of the audience asked me a question.
The question was, ‘What could I recommend people learn to do, to become more successful’. It stumped me for a minute or two as I thought about it, and my answer was simple, ‘Make faster decisions’.
You see, when you make fast decisions, it doesn’t matter if you are making the right or wrong decision, you are just deciding. In fact there is no right or wrong decision, there is only the decision itself, and that’s the important thing to remember.
If you made a wrong decision, you can learn from it quickly.
If you made a good decision you can more forward quicker towards your goals.
Either way, you get to your destination quicker.
I used the analogy of a maze to describe the decision making process. When you come to a fork in the path and you have to decide whether you go left or right, it’s better to be fast in your decision than to think it over. If you go one way and end up in a dead end, you can very quickly turn around and get back to the fork and go the other direction.
By doing this process quickly, you get to the destination quicker. If you took time to mull over the path each time a fork comes along, you’ll be there forever. Worse yet, you could end up being indecisive and that will lead you nowhere fast!
Life is the same. Make fast decisions and you’ll get to where you want to be, quicker.
One final note, making fast decisions doesn’t mean going with your gut instinct or taking a guess or hunch. Making fast decisions means quickly weighing up pros and cons and being efficient with your filtering and analysis to making that decision without second guessing yourself.
