How to make a choice.
As I’m aging, I learn to take more factors into consideration to find a better choice. As an adult, I have to think carefully when making a choice, because we have to take responsibility for ourselves. Generally it’s not easy to make a good decision. To my mind, following approaches will help us make a better choice.
To start with, we should list all the choices on the paper. In this case, we’ll be clear how many and what kind of choices we have. This procedure reminds us not ignoring some crucial choices, so that we won’t choose a so-called better choice among bad ones.
In the second place, we need to write down the pros and cons of each choice. Nobody dare to promise his pros and cons are the best in the world and nobody is able to be aware of all aspects of a choice. However we need to try our best to figure all advantages and disadvantages as much as possible. Again, we should avoid omitting significant influences of each choice. A good suggestion here is using brainstorm. It will bring us more ideas and you can google it to learn how to make a brainstorm to think better.
Last but not least, it’s time to make comparison and the final decision. After all the things having been written on the paper, we’ll begin to “make a choice”. Before that we still need to ask ourselves what we really want, instead of which choice sounds great or which choice most people will choose. Then we get to focus on every pro and every con, make a simple add of them, and compare the result of each choice. According to what we really want, it’s easier to make a brilliant choice. Because sometimes a choice seems to bring us abundant benefits on the surface, on the other hand, those benefits may just be regarded as temporary fortune instead of what we really care about. Anyway we have to make a choice based on a certain standard according what we’ve analyzed.
In the end we’ll got a best choice and eliminate other bad ones. Usually the choices that we are going to choose are obviously good ones. Unfortunately in some circumstance we’ll be in a dilemma when every choice is equally attractive.
Here are 2 tips that may help. 1. Talk to others. As the proverb goes, two heads are better than one. If you have no idea what to do, it’s always wise to ask others. A talk will help you to reorganize your thoughts and obtain others’ fresh ideas. 2. Follow your feel. It seems unbelievable to give the choice-making job to feel especially when this choice may change our future. It seems ridiculous to use feeling instead rational analyses. But when you look back at history, you will find millions of choices are born of feel. So when you make a choice, pay attention to your feelings.
In the end, after you have tried everything to choose a good decision, it’s still inevitable to make a bad choice. So the following is the most important advice: Make sure you learn from any bad choices you've ever made and try to avoid making the same bad decision twice!
How to make a right choice.
Which job should you take? What car should you buy? Should you ask him to marry you? Are you ready for another baby? Is this house right for you, or should you keep looking before you make an offer?
Life is full of hard choices, and the bigger they are and the more options we have, the harder they get.
As it happens, our brains are fairly binary两重的. They can react very quickly when presented with two options, especially when one’s clearly better. Stand here and drown in the rising waters or jump onto that big rock and be safe? Easy choice.
When presented with more options, though, we choke up. Jump onto the rock or climb the tree? We don’t know which is clearly better, and research shows that most people will not choose at all when presented with several equally good options.
Practice, experience, and rules of thumbs can help us to make those split-second decisions (for example, “When in doubt, go left” has done pretty well for me so far). Fortunately we don’t normally face immediate, do-or-die decisions – we usually have the luxury of working through a decision.
Getting Past Pros and Cons
The old chestnut栗子 of decision-making is the list of pros and cons. You make two columns on a piece of paper and write down all the positive things that will come of making a choice in one column and all the negative things in the other. In the end, the side with the most entries wins.
But this strategy doesn’t take into account the different weight that each positive or negative might have. If one of your pros is “will make a million dollars” and one of your cons is “might get a hangnail”, they don’t exactly cancel each other out.
Some people counter this problem by assigning point values to each item in their list. A huge income might be worth +20 points, while a tiny risk might be only –1. This helps make a more realistic assessment of your options.
But pros and cons aren’t always apparent or obvious, and the whole list-making process doesn’t sit well with many people – especially impulsive易冲动的, “seat-of-the-pants” who might feel unnaturally hampered by the formality of the pro and con list.
Here are some other strategies for making big decisions. Not all of them will work for every person or for every decision, but they all have something to offer to help you clarify your thinking and avoid “decision paralysis” while the water rises around you.
Analyze outcomes
Working through a big decision can give us a kind of tunnel vision, where we get so focused on the immediate consequences of the decision at hand that we don’t think about the eventual outcomes we expect or desire.
When making a choice, then, it pays to take some time to consider the outcome you expect. Consider each option and ask the following questions:
What is the probable outcome of this choice?
What outcomes are highly unlikely?
What are the likely outcomes of not choosing this one?
What would be the outcome of doing the exact opposite?
Thinking in terms of long-term outcomes – and broadening your thinking to include negative outcomes – can help you find clarity and direction while facing your big decision.
Ask why – five times
The Five Whys are a problem-solving technique invented by Sakichi Toyoda, the founder of Toyota. When something goes wrong, you ask “why?” five times. By asking why something failed, over and over, you eventually get to the root cause.
Why did my car break down? A spark plug failed. Why? It was fouled. Why? I didn’t get a tune-up. Why? I was too busy playing GTA4. Why? Because I’m miserable and lonely and the people in the game are the only ones that really love me.
See? Your car broke down because you’re a sociopath不喜交际的人.
Although developed as a problem-solving technique, the Five Whys can also help you determine whether a choice you’re considering is in line with your core values. For instance:
Why should I take this job? It pays well and offers me a chance to grow. Why is that important? Because I want to build a career and not just have a string of meaningless jobs. Why? Because I want my life to have meaning. Why? So I can be happy. Why? Because that’s what’s important in life.
Notice that you sometimes have to change how you’ ask “why” to keep the questions focused inward rather than outward to irrelevant external factors. It wouldn’t do any good to ask “Why does this job pay well and offer me a chance to grow” since the important thing is that it does, not why it does.
Follow your instincts
Research shows that people who make decisions quickly, even when lacking information, tend to be more satisfied with their decisions than people who research and carefully weight their options. Some of this difference is simply in the lower level of stress the decision created, but much of it comes from the very way our brains work.
The conscious mind can only hold between 5 and 9 distinct thoughts at any given mind. That means that any complex problem with more than (on average) 7 factors is going to overflow the conscious mind’s ability to function effectively – leading to poor choices.
Our unconscious, however, is much better at juggling and working through complex problems. People who “go with their gut” are actually trusting the work their unconscious mind has already done, rather than second-guessing it and relying on their conscious mind’s much more limited ability to deal with complex situations.
The Choice is Yours
Whatever process you use to arrive at your decision, your satisfaction with your decision will depend largely on whether you claim ownership of your choices. If you feel pressured into a choice or not in control of the conditions, you’ll find even positive outcomes colored negatively. On the other hand, taking full responsibility for your choices can make even failure feel like a success – you’ll know you did your best and you’ll have gained valuable experience for next time.
