I have a habit of writing about my day in a journal, It’s been a long time since I started doing this and it really paid off.
I also have a decision journal, I write about my decisions there, things like deciding t do business with someone or rejecting it, or about buying a stock or not, or why I like or don’t like a certain person, it’s all there.
This weekend I was going through both my daily & decision journals to find patterns of behavior in myself that I benefit from the most so I can make changes to my daily routine in that direction, but I found something more interesting.
In almost all cases where I made a wrong decision, or experienced a loss there was a common behavior in the center:
Inaction
Whatever the cause, I had my worst days after I decided to do nothing about a situation, I justified it as waiting for events to unfold or not having sufficient data.
I was sitting still and hoped everything is going to be alright!
Hope in terms of sitting and wishing for things to go right is naive, harmful and dangerous.
Hope only works when you gave it your all, It only works when you did all you could do. Hope isn’t supposed to do your job, it’s not going to change things that you can control, it’s a tool to stay sane about how things that are not under your control turn out.
So here are 2 new rules for my life:
- In almost every situation, doing something is better than sitting idle hoping that everything will turn out right
- Even if the action in the situation is to be waiting it has to be decided intentionally, not as a mere justification tool for procrastination, laziness, fear, or the residue of previous bad experiences.