Making the best/right decision part 2
The main goal of the part 1 was to show you the immense complexity of making the right decision by bringing in everything that is involved in to the light. Even though, it may seem near impossible task to make the right call always, especially in severely complex situation, we can’t just give up and do nothing about it, can we? So, once you are decided that you will do something about it to turn the probability into your favor, there are many options as to how to approach the situation. There are better options and worse options. In this part, I am going to share what I think is the better option.
Firstly, we need to take care of our psychological well-being or in other words, we need to be prepared for the possible failures and the aftermath effects on our psychological stability. The reason why we feel bad after failing to attain whatever the desired outcome is that the result didn’t meet our expectation. Especially, when are indulged in any sort of activity to gain something, we are leaving ourselves to be susceptible for the eventual emotional pain later if things don’t go as planned. Thus, we need to first liberate ourselves from the outcome dependency. To achieve independence from the outcomes, we must first learn to do things for their own sake, not for an external gain and enjoy the action of doing things not just the rewards. Once you can transform yourself into doing things to enjoy doing things, then you will be relieved from the outcome dependency and you will be fine and centered throughout the journey whatever the outcomes may turn out to be. When this state of mind is your second nature, even the worst outcome would have no effect on your psychological well-being.
Then, the next most important aspect we need to discuss is our longevity in the game. If you are dealing with a situation that is on the side of complexity, then you should be using the long-term strategic approach rather than a short-term approach since it is near impossible to get it right at the first try except the anomalies. Thus, we need to plan in the long term, not the short term. To stay in the game, we must ensure our survivability despite whatever the outcome we may face. Every try will be aimed for the best possible outcome at the same time prepared for the worst case scenario. For example, when you are learning to fly a jet, you are always going to have a parachute attached to your seat so that if things go south, with the help of the parachute you can stay alive and keep learning to fly instead of crashing together with the jet. One day, you may master the art of flying a jet. Even if mastered, things that are out of our control may still go wrong; thus, the need for the safety must always be ensured. If possible, this parachute must always be there unless you want the thrill of being on the edge of total collapse of any kind.
Now, having your psychological well-being and safety parachute are taken care of, we can go straight to the business. We are gonna introduce a few blocks to the system: correction block, intuition block, whole picture block and the additional safety measurement and new mindset blocks as well.
Safety measurement block: It is just there to remind us to ensure our safety before making a decision and acting upon it.
New mindset block: Doing things for their own sake: Same thing. It is just there to remind us to do things for their own sake and for nothing else.
Correction block: When you make a decision and get some result, regardless of the nature of the outcome, there are always lessons to be learned such as what went wrong and what went right. Even if things went completely right, a certain type of reflection still must be done so that you can pinpoint what really was the main factor behind the show. On the other hand, if things went south, then you can use the data and the experience you have gained to re-evaluate your assumptions about the involved variables and make a correction so that a slightly better decision can be made the next time. Missing out on this opportunity to reflect back on what happened is the same thing as throwing away a present someone is giving to you. You have gone through all of those actions and adventures and to me, the real gift and the result of doing something is the aftermath, the wisdom that it imparts you . We only realize that opportunity to elevate our games when we take some time to reflect. You do however many iterations of this process and one day you will get what you have wanted due the law of cause-and-effect.
Intuition block: Intuition is something that still baffles us and still isn’t fully explained by the science because it is beyond logic. You see, logic is quite a limited tool. Anything it can’t explain, it just labels it as a paradox and moves on. But life is much more wider and richer than a mere logic. There are so many aspects of life that are beyond and unexplainable by logic. However, our intuition makes sense of it. Logic is like a pistol whereas intuition is more like an atomic bomb. So, no wonder why intuition explains things that are out of logic’s context.
Intuition will be used by us to make the process faster. You don’t want to make those small, incremental developments just by the process of correction only. Such pace is slow and it may even take your lifetime to achieve what you have wanted if you only depend on the process of correction alone. Use intuition extensively, depend on it more than the knowledge to paint the whole picture. If you can paint the whole picture by identifying the every involved variable and the interactions that take place between them, then the probability of achieving your desired result shoots through the roof.
To use intuition as your main weapon and your logic as the secondary, just give up on your conventional way of thinking, contemplating and ask for your intuition to do some work and wait. Be letting go of your pistol, now you make yourself available to use the atomic bomb. And, be ready and be aware when it dumps a massive amount of information that don’t even make sense on you suddenly because you don’t know when it is coming. It just comes like how Mendeleev was given the picture of the periodic table in his dream. And, I guess, the more you use it, the more you get better at using it or in better words, allow it to run and be aware of its progress? I don’t really know, I am no expert on this but this is usually what happens to me when my intuition is running the business. Suddenly, the answer I was seeking shows up knocking on the front door. The more you let go of logic and your conventional way of thinking, the more you allow your intuition to act, and the better you get at it. But, it is not the same thing as drifting or the autopilot mode. Using your intuition is as if you have let go of the driving wheel yet at the same time, you are not fooling around. It is the same thing as being in the flow, effortless effort. Your intuition needs time to calibrate and be familiar with the constraints and once the calibration is done, it just does it with no effort.
Whole Picture block: Each iteration of the whole process to come at the right decision leads to a more understanding of the whole system, situation, whatever you are dealing with. At first, it was fuzzy. Nothing was known about it except some information you have gathered. Then, the more you deal with the beast, the more you understand the nature of the beast. It is like playing a video game. When you are stuck at a certain level, at a certain boss, at first you die easily because you didn’t know anything about the boss. But, then more you try to defeat that level, the more information you gather about the level, the more you understand the level which make it more probable to defeat the boss in the next tries. Then, when you get the idea of the whole picture, it just becomes a piece of cake to defeat the same boss which was giving you hard time in the beginning. As you can see, the whole process allowed you to build the whole picture piece by piece, one by one, brick by brick so that later, the kingdom would be built. The clearer the bigger picture, the better the decision you would make and sooner or later, the intended results get achieved. Remember, whole picture is achieved only when the only necessary pieces are woven together which means you also need to get rid of that which don’t belong; add what belong and get rid of what doesn’t belong. This is the true definition of the whole picture: full presence of the necessary and the complete absence of unnecessary.
At first, you would have very vague whole picture. Then, you add the things you think that belong. Then, when you realize you have introduced pieces that don’t belong, just get rid of them however attached you may be to them. Do this process of adding what seems to belong, removing what is proven unnecessary and keeping what is already proven necessary. Do this iterations as required and you will have your whole picture to build the best and the right decision from there on. I used the word “proven” very loosely here. Sometimes, you don’t need to prove the validity of certain pieces because they make sense 100% sense. But, when you are filled with only pieces that make 100 percent sense but you still are not getting the intended result then that means one or many pieces aren’t really 100% valid. You have to go back and test your assumptions of their validity again. Also, trying to see the whole picture helps us preventing us from tunnel-visioning on a small details as well. Here comes the fruitfulness of developing the ego-less self which is not attached to any ideas, perceptions and such so that true judgement can be made about what is as I have discussed in the part 1.
Follow through this process and you will not fail to make the right decision as long as you are aiming for the long-term gain and your safety is always ensured. In the part 1, we have discovered the near-impossibility of making the right decision and it seemed futile to even dare to do it. But with the correct approach, you can see that you can get there eventually or even if you don’t get to where you want to be, you would still feel that the whole process was a great adventure and would cherish the experience of doing so which is the actual reward of going after something that is really hard. When we get the reward we were seeking, we realize that the whole meaning of the process was not the end but the journey itself, the action itself. These actions and moments are what make us feel alive and impart greater wisdom to us. You will realize that the art and the essence of the game is not the end-result but the game itself. You will realize that we play games to just to play not to get somewhere. In this context, you can see that making the right decision even though it may be impossible to do so was the reward itself. It wasn’t so much about getting it right but the process to get it right, the game itself, the play itself.
