I’d like to share with you, one of the best pieces of advice anyone ever gave me:
“If you want to make more progress in the next 7 days, than you have in the past year, start making those difficult choices that you know you need to make, but have been avoiding until now.”
We are all capable of making the easy choices, those which require just a little stretching. Because these decisions require marginal effort, they tend to lead to little, if any, meaningful progress. After all, we can’t grow without stretching.
Big decisions
The giant strides are made, when we dig down deep – when we make the decisions we have been ducking, because they are difficult. These are the BIG decisions that lead to lasting, quantum change. However, these major decisions almost always have a significant risk attached, which is why the vast majority of people avoid them. Very few things in business come with a 100% guarantee. One of the exceptions to this rule, is that we can guarantee that we will place a very low ceiling on our potential, if we avoid making difficult decisions.
When I recorded my extremely popular Motivation Master Class audio program, I interviewed a number of very elderly people, to ask them about the things in life they looked back on, with regret. I wanted to learn from their experience. It was extremely valuable. In every case, the things they regretted were the things they didn’t do. Their focus seems to have been on, ‘what if it fails?‘, so they did nothing. Then, as they looked back on their lives, they were left wondering ‘what if it had worked?’
In short: When we put off making the big decisions, we are feeding our need for short-term comfort, at the expense of our future happiness.