Decisions

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The direction our life takes is greatly influenced by the decisions we make. Good decisions have a definitively positive impact on our life, whereas bad decisions can derail us. Decisions can also negate otherwise conflicting traits; a well-intentioned person can make poor decisions that results in harm to themselves or others.

The most frequent decisions matter the most. This is counterintuitive, because we place a lot of weight on the most infrequent decisions such as where to go to college or what job to take. In these cases, we might encounter such decisions as little as one or two times in our entire life. They feel important because they are so immediately consequential. We can feel the weight of the next several years of our life changing as we make these choices. It is true that these big decisions matter. But it does not imply the converse, i.e. that the smaller, everyday decisions we encounter are any less important.

Let's consider a hypothetical situation where you're in poor physical shape and you want to improve your overall fitness. Your lifestyle so far hasn't been cutting it and you want to make a drastic change. So you decide to purchase a gym membership. A fair amount of effort goes into this; you need to figure out what gyms are close to you, what equipment they offer, how much each of their memberships cost, and so on. After some deliberation you make the big leap and sign up for a fitness club about a mile away from your home. Here's the twist: in the weeks following this purchase, you end up not going to the gym at all. Of course, there's some reason you decide not to go each of these days. But each time, this is a decision you make. A small decision, but nonetheless important.

You tell everyone you know about the big decision about purchasing a gym membership. You don't tell anyone about the relatively small decision of not going to the gym yesterday, or the day before, or the day before that. Even if you did, it probably wouldn't elicit as much of a reaction. There's not much depth in those decisions. A single day of exercise doesn't yield significant results in isolation. On the other hand, purchasing that gym membership is a bigger commitment. At the very least, you've signed a contract through the next month. But in the context actually achieving your fitness goals, that decision doesn't matter. You didn't need a gym membership at all. You could've done pushups at home and gone for a run in your neighborhood. The decisions that are actually relevant are the smaller ones you make every day.

It's typical to let the people around you know when you've made a big decision in your life. These moments largely define what others know about us, and maybe that's part of why we think they are more important than they really are. When you decide where to go to college, everyone in your circle hears about it. But you probably wouldn't tell as many people about the smaller decision to walk up to a professor after class and ask them about a summer internship working in their lab. And yet, those latter types of small decisions are more predictive of the results we look to get. For example, picking the "right" college but deciding not to take advantage of the individual resources available to you is unlikely to result in a successful career. And if you somehow screw up the decision of where to go to college but continue to be proactive and take advantage of the opportunities you do have, your everyday decisions will still prevail. In other words, if you're consistently making high-quality decisions every day, it's unlikely one "bad" decision will erase your progress. So making good decisions is more about building momentum than going in any specific direction. And this momentum is a culmination of every choice we make, no matter how small.