It’s always better to make a good decision than to wait endlessly for something that might eventually be better.
Perfection is the enemy of good.
A 14th-century French philosopher named Jean Buridan shed light on a particular issue. Buridan observed that there were certain people who were unable to make a choice when faced with two options that were very similar, or that differed only slightly from one another at the moment of decision and given the information the decision-maker had available.
There are certain people with a particular mindset who tend to waste too much time on the choice and the decision-making process, and who are unable to make a decision or commit to a course of action unless they are certain that the choice they are making is perfect.
Buridan describes a hypothetical situation that became known as Buridan’s Ass dilemma.
Imagine a donkey standing in front of two bales of hay. Both bales are the same size, made of the highest-quality hay, and identical to one another. They have the same shape and are the same distance from the donkey’s mouth. Faced with the choice of going one way or the other, the donkey pauses to think and ponder which one to choose. And, unable to reach a decision that satisfies it, it ends up never making a choice… and eventually starves to death while facing the two bales.
This allegory shows how an inability to make decisions can lead to paralysis that benefits us in no way.
... Does it have a answer?
When we make a choice, it doesn’t have to be, with absolute certainty, the best possible choice. There are choices—and paths we decide to take—where we’ll never know if they were the best, or if there might have been something better about the alternative path or choice. We shouldn’t waste time and energy thinking and rethinking something that might not even have an answer.
Ultimately, there are choices that have no answer. There are choices we make that have no possible answer, or decisions we make that have no better answer or alternative.
In life, we’re faced with choices that we shouldn’t spend forever pondering which way we should go.
We simply have to move forward. And after we’ve made the decision, we can’t constantly dwell on whether it might have been better to go the other way, or to have chosen the other option.
Life is like that, too. There isn’t always a right answer, and we shouldn’t let these situations hold us hostage.
Do you remember a very difficult choice you had to make, and even today you don’t know if the alternative would have been better, or you’re not sure if it was the best choice you made? And among those difficult choices, was it that hard to commit to the choice and follow the path without thinking about turning back?
In life, I’ve had to choose a path that I didn’t know would take me so far. Sometimes—and much more often than we might think—we have to have the courage to admit to ourselves that we don’t know if the dilemma has a solution, and when we realize we’re stuck at that impasse, we must move forward and make a choice, rather than come to a standstill and stagnate.
Image by Eliza from Pixabay
Original text written by 
