On Your Radar

Decisions: Good, Bad or Just Decisions? February 16, 2010

Someone proclaimed today, the day of bad decisions. Which got me thinking; surely there must be some way to break such a vicious circle. For instance, decide to treat yourself to a really nice lunch, or ask out that person you’ve fancied for a while. But then what if this really nice lunch happens to give you food poisoning, or the person you fancy laughs in your face and leaves you feeling like a total loser? Surely that doesn’t make the decision a bad one.

Being the optimist that I am, I cannot call those decisions bad in hind side. But is there never any way of knowing of a decision is going to have a good or a bad outcome? That makes me a little sad. Surely we don’t make any decisions that will have a bad outcome on purpose, in which case you could argue that there isn’t such a thing as a bad decision at all.

Presumably, most people, when making a decision, weigh their options. How carefully they do this is, hopefully, based on how important the decision is or how influential the outcome. So when making a decision you could say that one is convinced this is a good decision. If the outcome is as we expected, or better, we say: “That was a good decision!” But was it really a good decision or was it just a decision?

Wouldn’t it be better to say: “It was a good thing I made that decision!” What’s the difference you ask? Well in the first way of saying it, it’s the decision that is good, whereas in the second way it was the making of the decision that was good and the decision itself remains neutral.

A bit anal, you say? You are probably a believer of good and bad decisions.