The Decision Dilemma

Decision-making can be a very challenging thing to do depending on the situation and it's something that requires thorough carefulness. As kids, our parents make decisions for us just because we have limited understanding about a lot of things and as we grow, we gather knowledge and experience to help us make decisions ourselves.

Although being careful doesn't guarantee that every decision we make will always give the expected result but it can reduce the casualties even when our decision turns out to be the wrong one. With every decision we come up with, there is this chance of things not going as planned even though the chances of success might be higher after a thorough check, this is why I love having an alternative whether success is guaranteed or not so setbacks sometimes don't come as a shock to me.

Some years ago, my street uncle got an offer from his friend who was relocating. The man runs a small bird poultry and was giving all he had there at a reasonable price. He sought my opinion and I told him it was a good deal but also a bad one because he had zero experience with raising birds and marketing it might become a terrible issue because the business was quite competitive back then.

He eventually took the decision and when his birds were ready for sale, getting customers was challenging. If he continues feeding the birds, he might run at a loss. He became scared and started regretting his decision immediately.

He told me about it and I blamed him for not having a backup plan. Luckily for him, an idea came because of a recent experience I had in the cold room during that period. So, I suggested that he slaughter the chickens and store them in a cold room.

He took the advice, did some research and after freezing it, we went about telling small shops selling frozen food and to my surprise, he even made more money because the chicken were sold in kilos, unlike the live one that had a general market price due to the competition.

Humans are far away from being a perfectionists and for this reason only, I believe we all know why sometimes our decisions can be wrong despite doing our assignments properly. It's just impossible to always get it right and I learn from my mistakes so that I don't repeat them when I have to make a similar decision.

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Before now, I used to believe that people have the gift of making decisions but I was wrong. No one was born with the gift to always make correct decisions and the secret behind making correct decisions always has to do with understanding what you are about to get involved in, doing research and gathering as much knowledge as you can, weighing the success/failure chances and make a decision that you think is best for you.

I have my practice before making a decision and they are very simple.

It all begins with understanding what I am getting involved with. A lot of people jump into making decisions with zero idea of what they are getting into and end up blaming their village people for the repercussions.

Until I understand whatever it is I want to decide about, I won't be able to reason properly and that would hinder scaling the success/failure chances. If I can't predict the results, I can't see what's ahead including the risk so understanding whatever I am going into is what matters first.

After understanding what I am getting into gathering information as much as I can comes next. The information can be from people's experiences and it doesn't matter as long as it will open my eyes to everything regarding this decision-making of a thing. The information will help me make many decisions and I just have to weigh everything that comes to mind before choosing which would work best for me.

Weighing my chances has to do with considering the risk that's involved because it's impossible not to have a risk in any decision you are making.

Immediately I came up with the decision, finding an alternative would be my next task just in case things didn't work out. It wouldn't make sense for me to start running around for an alternative after I have implemented my decision. I might not have enough time to come up with an alternative while under the pressure of the wrong decision I made.

With my alternative intact, I can implement my decision and despite all of this, unexpected challenges can pop out of nowhere. When things turn out like that, I try again and the experience from my first try must have taught me something very important.