Take a decision. If that turned out to be a good decision, think back and remember how you took that decision. If it turned out to be a bad decision, remember how you took that decision. Learn from your mistakes and soon you will be an expert decision maker.
What I would tell my younger self: above all, make good decisions: based on facts and solid reasoning grounded in a range of models of how the world is, paying particular attention to the magnitude of forces: respecting and using forces beyond your control, but always aiming to change the world around you to make you --us-- better.
Not deciding based on feelings or opinions or votes, or on chasing opportunities or shirking danger, etc. Practice daily in small decisions, and the big ones will come more easily.
There's a couple of rules that I have been following, more or less consciously, for the past few years:
1) Seek advice from people you respect.
2) Don't let fear take your decisions for you: Will you regret (not) doing this?
3) If you're thinking about taking a risk: How bad is the worst-case scenario, and how likely is it? Even if it's bad: Would it be worse not to have tried?
4) Think through your options carefully, but recognize that for many decisions, you will never reach absolute certainty. Learn to live with the concept of sufficient certainty.
5) Take a decision and run with it. Don't keep second-guessing yourself. Learn from your mistakes, but don't beat yourself up about them, especially if they were only evident in hindsight.
You don't. You use that feeling to improve every day. At some point you just have to jump into making certain decisions. And as you gain more and more experience you'll see that you make the right ones most of the time.
Definitely second this. Choices are hard, but decisions are easy. If you make hard rules for yourself and decide to follow them without exception, it is much easier to stick to, at least, that's what i've found for myself as well.
This may seem useless, but stop questioning yourself: make a choice, wrong or right, and stick with it. Making a choice, and learning to work around the consequences, is one of the most important character building events you will ever experience. Make a choice, resolve to stick through it no matter what.
I teach a corollary of this to my daughter (sans expletive): that most people know what decisions they should be making, and that these are mostly simple and often intuitive decisions, yet many people have difficulty making them because they usually involve a certain amount of discipline and/or sacrifice. Of course, I'm sometimes among them, but life's a work in progress.
Easiest way is to remember that not making a decision is itself a decision, it's just one done with zero analysis, zero conscious thought, and usually zero positive impact on the world. In other words, most of the time it's the worst possible decision you can make. So do your research and just pick a course, even if it's not perfect, because you'll never have perfect information. You don't have to; you just have to be better than everyone else's information.
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