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Making Decisions

How do we make decisions when faced with problems, whether it is a life changing one, or daily mundane ones like what to eat for lunch?

As usual, the excellent KnightofPentacles posted on this, he calls it the Thinking Tookit.

I also did some research, and there are some various interesting bits I picked up on this.

The miltary calls it command presence. When there are two passes through a mountain range, and they are both very much equal obstacles, a good commander swiftly declares, "That one, it's obviously better!", and gets everyone moving. If you do not have enough clear criteria to evaluate a situation to your satisfaction, do not waste time evaluating it by ambiguous criteria. If the situation looks very much 50-50, then either choice is as right as right can be.

Then there are those who solves it from the artistic viewpoint. In art, there is something call the "white page syndrome". You have a clean, white canvas, on it your talents enable you to paint anything. So you sit there, awash in the mental miasma of the endless possibilities assailing you. You then stop thinking, and draw a random line, and then based on what this restricts the possibilities to, you can start to build your decision around it.

As for me, I think I am more of letting the solution/decision to present itself. A decision will be made when the dateline of making the decision draws near. Of course the problem with this approach is that usually the better option that I should have opted for, becomes unavailable as the dateline gets closer. Other decisions made tend to be made emotionally, a classic case of letting the heart rules the brain.

But no matter whether it was a best option, or a wrong choice made, I would still make the best of it, and try my best not to regret the decision. We only live this life once, and it is just too short to start regretting all the wrong choices we made.

Life

Much have happened in the last couple of months of my life.

The lows.

I have seen my almost ten years of programming code stolen by someone. I have gone through the emotional stress resulting from it. From the countless trips to lawyers, with money as the bottomline, and the pain that came from it. It is not just the many hours of work put in and then used by someone else without my permission, but also the emotional ties to it.

Still stuck with the same job. Have applied for many, all without any result. And I have to watch as one by one, my colleague resigned and move on to a better job. And all this while, my boss goes from bad to worst. Total ignoring the many hours that we put in, how overwork we are, how worthless in terms of skill set we are, and how my other colleagues blame me for not speaking out. My explanation has always been the same, do not burnt your bridge while you are still on it. I have just too many committments and responsibilities now that I can't afford to be unemployed.

The highs.

My wife and I were decided to start looking out for a HDB flat of our own recently. And a balloting exercise by HDB was launched just a few weeks later. We went to look at the flats available, and they were all in very good locations, near to town and MRT stations. We applied. And waited. And when the letter came, we were overjoyed. We had a very good queue number, in front, a single digit queue number. We put in our first choice unit, and we got it. Now it is just a matter of waiting for the appointment to collect our keys. No matter that it is just a piece of 115sqm unit, for just 99 years, and we getting a 30 year loan to pay it off, it still feels good to have a place to call our own. The whole process of applying, choosing our units of choice, and getting our first choice unit, to the now ongoing process of looking for interior designers, thinking of how we want our house to be, I guess in way actually strengthens the relationship between my wife and I. When we were a newly married couple, we were still probing, getting used to each other, and along the way, there were the usual bumps and potholes. The whole process of getting a flat has brought us together even closer than before. I guess when a married couple actually do things together, it really strengthens the marriage.

We learn from our past, we live the present, and look forward to the future. In that way, we can live life to the fullest.