How to make decisions in an ever changing world
Photo by Ross Findon on Unsplash
Anybody else listening to a lot of Kesha lately?
No? Just me?
Well this is what happens when your 3rd grader decides “We R Who We R” is her new soccer pre-game anthem.
Good luck getting this song out of your head!
It turns out hearing this song a thousand times makes you think about how we make decisions in an ever-changing world. I think it’s important to begin by recognizing on our financial journey and our journey through life more generally that…
As our lives change, we need to change too.
Changing ourselves usually requires letting go of who we used to be on some level.
(To quote Kesha again) This is hard, hard, ha-ha-ha-hard.
For example, we start our financial journey by saving and investing a portion of our income for roughly 30 to 40 years. But then one day, upon our retirement, we’re expected to seamlessly transition from decades of saving and regular income to spending and creating our own income using those same savings and investments.
No problem, right? Yeah, not so much.
Another example that might resonate is when your current home no longer works for your family’s needs. While wrestling internally with the memories experienced and emotions attached to your home, you’re supposed to simultaneously prepare to increase your housing expenses to a level you’re able to afford now but perhaps never thought you would.
Easy peasy, right?
So let’s make no mistake about it…
Making good decisions in an ever-changing world is both on-going and difficult.
And while there’s no changing the fact that life is change and change is hard, here’s what we can keep in mind to help make that reality more tolerable:
1. Focus our time and energy on what we can control.
The best we can do is stack the deck in our favor by making the best decision using the information available to us at that moment. The rest is out of our hands.
2. Recognize hindsight is only valuable when applied to future decisions.
Everyone has used the benefit of hindsight to beat themselves up over past decisions. Now let’s all agree to try and stop doing that, shall we? Instead, let’s take that information and apply it to what we can control – our future decisions.
3. Be ready to change our minds.
I personally find the mantra “strong convictions, loosely held” to be very helpful when it comes to changing my mind. While it might not play well in the political world, it can be a very effective tool for navigating your life.
4. Get comfortable saying, “I don’t know.”
There are so many things in life we just can’t know with any certainty. So we can A) spend our lives banging our heads against the wall fighting this reality or B) get better at accepting it.
And as a recovering ‘bang my head against the wall’ guy, let me just tell you how freeing it is to learn to say, “I don’t know.”
So what started out with a Kesha lyric morphed into a missive on tackling how we can make better decisions on this roller coaster we call life. I hope you found something helpful here but on the off chance that you didn’t, maybe you just need to listen to the song another thousand times :)