Quotes About Decisions

I didn't know what I wanted. I trained at the Kodokan and reflected at quiet shrines and enjoyed my jazz clubs and coffee houses and whisky bars. I took long, nocturnal walks through the damascene city, and considered what I'd been part of, and what I'd almost caused. I wondered about my son and I missed Delilah. I thought about Horton. I made no decisions. I

In a world of scarcity, opportunities don't present themselves in bunches, and the decisions people face are between approach and avoidance, acceptance or rejection.

So the researchers concluded that being forced to confront trade-offs in making decisions makes people unhappy and indecisive.

emotional cost of potential trade-offs does more than just diminish our sense of satisfaction with a decision. It also interferes with the quality of decisions themselves.

And once people are in the position to be able to work at any time from any place, they face decisions every minute of every day about whether or not to be working.

The key thing to appreciate, though, is that what is most important to us, most of the time, is not the objective results of decisions, but the subjective results.

We would be better off if we lowered our expectations about the results of decisions

The more difficult information gathering is, the more likely it is that you will rely on the decisions of others.

decisions as trivial as renting a video become important if we believe that these decisions are revealing something significant about ourselves.

AS WE HAVE SEEN, REGRET WILL MAKE US FEEL WORSE AFTER DECISIONS—EVEN ones that work out—than we otherwise would, especially when we take opportunity costs into consideration.

So even before your eyes are more than half open—long before you've had your first cup of coffee—you've made a dozen choices or more. But they don't count, really, as choices. You could have done otherwise, but you never gave it a thought.

simply by being aware of the process we can anticipate its effects, and therefore be less disappointed when it comes. This means that when we are making decisions, we should think about how each of the options will feel not just tomorrow, but months or even years later.

we have too many choices, too many decisions, too little time to do what is really important.

AWAY OF EASING THE BURDEN THAT FREEDOM OF CHOICE IMPOSES IS to make decisions about when to make decisions. These are what Cass Sunstein and Edna Ullmann-Margalit call second-order decisions. One kind of second-order decision is the decision to follow a rule.

Thus the growth of options and opportunities for choice has three, related, unfortunate effects.   It means that decisions require more effort. It makes mistakes more likely. It makes the psychological consequences of mistakes more severe.  

A GENERATION AGO, ALL UTILITIES WERE REGULATED MONOPOLIES. Consumers didn't have to make decisions about who was going to provide telephone or electric service.

So by forcing us to look around at what others are doing before we make decisions, the world of bountiful options is encouraging a process that will often, if not always, leave us feeling worse about our decisions than we would if we hadn't engaged in the process to begin with. Here is yet another reason why increasing the available options will decrease our satisfaction with what we choose.

It took at least three hundred years of debate before the question of the canon even began to reach closure. The decisions that were eventually made were not handed down from on high, and they did not come right away. The canon was the result of a slow and often painful process, in which lots of disagreements were aired and different points of view came to be expressed, debated, accepted, and suppressed.

The decisions about which books should finally be considered canonical were not automatic or problem-free; the debates were long and drawn out, and sometimes harsh.

Stephen Kinzer

Our behavior is a function of our decisions, not our conditions.

Consequences are governed by principles, and behavior is governed by values, therefore, value principles!

It's easy to say "no!" when there's a deeper "yes!" burning inside.

you can't talk your way out of problems you behave yourself into." *