How to Make a Series of Good Decisions — Do This First
Your life is the summation of the decisions you make. Some decisions are good, some are bad, and some are neutral. Putting the neutral decisions aside, success in life is more likely when most decisions turn out to be good decisions, and the bad decisions are few and far between. The question is how do you do this?
Today as I was flipping through my highlights in the famous Jim Collins book Good to Great, I came across a simple answer to this question. In Chapter 4 Collins has a subtitle Facts Are Better Than Dreams. He then states:
One of the dominant themes from our research is that breakthrough results come about by a series of good decisions, diligently executed and accumulated one on top of another.
He later goes on to write:
When you start with an honest and diligent effort to determine the truth of the situation, the right decisions often become self-evident. It is impossible to make good decisions without infusing the entire process with an honest confrontation of the brutal facts.
Ultimately, Collins concludes that you can get lucky and make one or two good decisions without facts. However, it’s impossible to make a series of good decisions without the process of confronting brutal facts.
This may seem like common sense, however common sense is not always common. So to state it plainly, you can only guarantee you’re making good decisions by starting the decision making process with confronting the brutal facts. If you don’t know the facts, then accept that your naivety is the fact and the next best decision you can make is to find out those facts.