I think about decisions a lot as this was - back in my Pro Poker Player(tm) days - basically my job. But of course, there's more to life than poker but this does not mean the same thinking can not apply to take make a good choice, to take the best decisions and ultimately: to live with the decisions you made. Or I made, as it is.
What plagues me about decisions is how to know you made the right one. That is not a simple question at all, although it might seem at first. I think it's mostly a question a of timeline. On a small enough timeline, any decision is really good or at least neutral. nothing happens!
As they say: Even falling feels like flying for a little while.
On the other hand, take the longest of views and every decision is meaningless as you know, everyone dies! You will die too, no matter if you move, marry, quit or travel the world right now.
So, simply by choosing a good timeline you make your life easy in dealing with...
I mean, I need to make a parenthesis here. Decisions are actually not hard and they do not manifest again in our lives after we made one. What happens is, of course, that they have consequences and that we need to deal with these as they manifest.
...some sort of consequence. In short, we can chose to believe that every decision has a statue of limitation and everything that happens after the statue of limitation has passes is simply a new problem to be analyzed and discussed in isolation. IF one can though.
I do believe that to be happy implies a lot of self-bullshiting. You can not see the world clearly and still be confident in yourself, in the fellow man, in the future and your abilities. Weather we like it or not, a little lying is necessary. So when you chose to look at decisions in any kind of isolation you are lying to yourself. The lie is that everything is not connected. On the other hand, not accepting this lie leads to madness, mysticism or worse.
I am rambling a bit here to kind of try to describe my state of mind when I start to analyze my decisions and how good I fared at choosing well in the past. Not that good to be honest :)
Given all this, what is a good decision?
I think that it's clear - if what I wrote above makes any sense - that looking at consequences to evaluate the quality of a decision is not a smart way to go about this as they are tricky and very easily skewed data. So we if the future won;t help, then the key must be in the past.
I came to the conclusion that a good decision is a decision we think BEST NOW based on everything we know about PAST events related to this. Weather we take all the relevant information in the consideration or take a superficial approach it makes no difference as for each of us, this was the best we could have done, at that moment...consequences be damned!
This is a very freeing way to look at things. It frees you from the bad outcomes. It lets you live with your decisions. It's what I call " Living in the best world possible" approach to life.
Every decision cements one and only one possible universe but kills an infinite others. we MUST believe that just by the power of taking a path, that path becomes the best one possible. Now and forever.
But if I told you the odds are infinite against this being true? And that only a fool would walk through life thinking this, then what?
Ah, then, you get back to bullshitting and smiling.
You can do it :)