Bad Decision vs Wrong Decision - There is a Difference

Our entire lives are filled with a series of decisions - what should I eat, which road should I take, should I make that call, etc. Some of these decisions can have an immediate impact on our life and some have a longer term effect.

What we eat, good or bad, normally doesn't make a difference in our day-to-day life. But over a period of years or even decades, it can have a huge impact on our health, quality of life, and longevity. Here, wrong decisions - many of them over a long period - do constitute "bad" decisions.

But, what about other decisions made with less knowledge about what the future holds? Of course, none of us really can predict the future, so we decide things based on what information is available. Is that stock, or the stock market, going to go up or down? Is the left fork in the road, or the right fork, the best way to get to where I want to go? When we don't know what the future will bring or what lies down that stretch of road, we must make decisions based on hunches, educated guesses, and maybe even intuition. The bottom line is that a decision made on the best available information can often be the wrong decision - but that doesn't make it a bad decision.

It's like flipping a coin. If you choose tails and it comes up heads, then you made a wrong decision, not a bad one - unless, of course, you knew it was one of those "two-headed" coins.

Now, don't get me wrong or misunderstand because many of us do make bad decisions. Sometimes we might pick a particular thing (direction, investment, friend) based on "wishful" thinking rather than what we know in our hearts and minds. Then it is a bad decision.

So what do we do? Well, we still have to make those choices every day, many times a day. The best we can do is to get as much information as we reasonably can in the time allowed and then decide. The next best thing we should do is realize that sometimes our reasoned decisions will be wrong and not waste time agonizing over "what if", but learning from the experience and moving on.

Sometimes, decisions are wrong but not, necessarily, bad.

So . . . . . as lunch approaches, I can't decide . . . . . is it going to be a salad or a burger? Some decisions are harder than others. :-)