Art of decisions

Following up to my last rant. It was incomplete. Decisions are difficult and need to be dissected some more to understand them. 

Let’s see what comprises a decision - a decision is made when a combination of belief, desires, temperament and logic hit what could appear to be the perfect recipe. Chances are that the recipe is off many a times due to not breaking down the art of decisions and understanding the impact of each component. 

Belief - deals with what is expected to be true; one assumes that the concept is true without any empirical proof . A belief is a mental representations of the ways our brains expect things in our environment to behave, and how things should be related to each other in other words the patterns our brain expects the world to conform to

Desire - is a strong feeling of wanting to have something or wishing for something to happen

Just these two building blocks are good enough to cause a problem . I could desire something that is physically difficult and also have the belief that said impossible task can be achieved. The best example unfortunately has to do with terminally ill folks. They desire to live and believe that a medical miracle is possible (in the very rare case it does happen - it has to do with the 3rd variable and a little more that could be the subject of another rant in the future) 

Temperament - deals with a person’s nature and how that nature can impact behaviour. Someone said this (I forget who) “You can’t check your emotions. Emotions drive decision-making and interpersonal relationships. Understanding personality is a useful way to think about how this happens, one that people can grasp easily.”  In short the type of person you are will have an impact . One can learn about what the dominant personality type one has and then factor that when making decisions. 

Logic - in philosophical terms logic is the attempt to explain the rules and norms of reason. Reason is simply a type of thought. LOL simple definition and in reality a far complex subject . This is the basis of most philosophical ideas and theories put forward by many brilliant folks. I cannot even start to try to nail the subject down but can recommend a good book as a starting point for anyone interested - Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder.  The book will explain the history of Reason and Philosophy 

The understanding of building blocks does not get us any closer to the how or why of decision making. There still appears to be a hidden something that people love to call instinct - however surrender to an unknown force to help chose and or decide is not what we are talking about. Most folks love surrendering to the autonomous brain while making decisions because they believe that the decision has no long term impact (this is where belief, desires, temperament kick in as the major forces to influence the decisions); the same folks will willingly spend a lot of time debating the pros and cons if they realise that the decision will have and can have long term impact (here is where we add logic to the process). There is no harm in making decisions based on the gut; in fact in a situation where life is in question gut decisions are statically proven to be the best. But then life isn’t in question all the time and it makes absolute sense that gut decisions would not be the best all the time. 

It makes sense to analyse the impact of a decision. A decision could have multiple paths to the end result . These paths could be divergent or convergent . It starts with try to map the different variables (4 basic ones; could be more) mathematically one has to think about 2^n combinations. Some of them might be redundant but one has to think about them.  It’s this process of thinking about the decisions you make on a daily basis (maybe after the fact) that helps tune or reprogram your brain into picking the correct options when you start to very consciously allow the autonomous brain functions to make the decisions. 

The process of evaluating each decision and then mentally registering what was good/could be better is what is the difference between successful people and the average joe. This is what is meant when someone says learning from mistakes. 

C