@july

I am a slow decision-maker at times It takes me a really long time to come to decisions. Especially about ideas and things that I've never encountered before. Which makes me wonder, what is a decision? Because sometimes I make decisions that either I'm wrong, sometimes I make decisions and they prove right, but I don't even remember making the decision. I wonder if decisions are just simply heuristics. I'd prefer to think of decisions more like hitting a tennis ball. Or rowing. As if it's some sort of physical activity. A decision is not final, though some are much more difficult to reverse, or even sometimes impossible. But there's varying degrees of irreversibility to them. I think of decisions as being physical acts of rowing or tennis. What I mean by that is you think a lot about what direction you're rowing in or you think a lot about how to hit a ball on the tennis racket. If you work with professional tennis coaches from an early age, there are stories of tennis coaches that don't even let you hit a ball in a racket unless you've really fully learned the form and the process for how to hit a ball. I think about decisions similarly in this way. I think it's mostly a process that borrows pretty well from physical activity metaphors. You scan the horizon to understand your context. You practise your form to be able to execute on demand. Then you learn the most important thing, which is timing. How to time the oar or how to time the point of impact. That's always often seen as the decision. And then there's other things like strengthening and training to continuously be in the best possible place to hit the ball. Wherever you may be to prepare yourself for all kinds of different situations and all kinds of different outcomes post-decision. But mostly I think of it as if you've done the training and if you've done your research, most of the work is before hitting the actual tennis ball. I think when I'm slow at decision-making it's because I find myself needing to train myself extremely quickly in something new that I haven't done before, understand it and grok it to 80% and start doing training. That's a borderline impossible task. And so I make not so good decisions but compound that over a long enough period of time in different domains in different spaces. You start to build essentially a repertoire of training and a repertoire and a registry of pre-made decisions and that becomes the library that you can lean on which allows you to give you an idea about what ball to hit when. In this way, I think you encounter people who make very quick decisions, or in other words, get to answers really quickly, and you think that they might be some sort of genius or really smart. More often than not, it's that they have a large library, or a large built-up cache of pre-made decisions that they've previously researched or previously understood or contextualized. So the pattern matching is insanely quick without having to do a ton of work in between. I think observing the fact that I'm a slow decision maker on certain things is recognizing the fact that I have a willingness to dive into getting to a place where I need to make decisions about things that I'm uncomfortable or I don't know much about. Wherever my curiosity drives me towards, I'm willing to live with that, as long as over time I get connected to other things that I can make pretty quick decisions on.

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