Good Enough Decision towards Best Decision

As our life goes, we are continuously making decisions. Making decisions about our business, about our career or even about our life. Having the power to make decisions is good news, but the bad news is that we are being judged on our decisions, even worse, we are being judged by ourselves on our own decisions. We are frequently questioning ourselves about the quality of our decisions.

Frequent Question: Is it actually the best decision!?

Most of the time, finding the best decision is so hard that we do not arrive at any decision! This is the time you should say:

Taking a good enough decision is much better than finding (not taking) the best decision. Why is that so!?

The reason is something tricky. In brief the answer is:

Just take good enough decisions, and later, make them to become your best decisions by your further actions.

But to understand it, you should consider two totally different time points with these characteristics, separately:

1. The time point you make a decision.
2. The time point you look back and judge your decision.

The former is static,as decisions are made in some specific time. For instance, when you decide to move to another company for a new job at 2015, your decision time is a fixed value: 2015. 

But the former time point is dynamic. For example you can look back and judge your decision at 2015, 2016, or some day in 2020 and you can evaluate it as:

• the best decision in 2015 (as the salary is really high),
• a fairly good decision at the end of month (you understand that new position is really stressful),
• a bad decision  in 2016 (Your job is too hard),
• a very bad decision in 2017 (Your company fails in its business),
• and finally, the best decision of your life in 2020 (As your learned lessons helped you to become the CEO of Microsoft at 2020)!

As you see, the evaluation of a decision varies from time to time. It could be evaluated as good when you made it. But in order to evaluate it as a best decision, it should also remain a best decision in any time in the future. And believe me, it is really hard (mostly impossible!)

The best decision depends on the time it's being evaluated. So a decision can be considered best for now, fairly good for next week and bad for next year.

When can you finally evaluate your decision to check if it was the best? At the time of your death, maybe!

Some Mathematics

If you see it mathematically, there are 2 evaluation functions:

IsGoodEnough(situation)

IsBest(situation, judgment_time)

With a fixed situation as input, the answer of IsGoodEnough is fixed value over the time. But Having same fixed situation again, the answer for IsBest depends to judgment time and varies over the time.

The Final Word

So, just take it easy! The value of your decision will change over the time, but the key point is:

You are the one, who can convert your good enough decisions to your best decisions.

Further actions in your life, can improve the evaluation of your decisions. So, you should just take good enough decisions, and later, make them to become your best decisions by your further actions.

Just take good enough decisions, and later, make them become your best decisions by your further actions.

So this rule is applicable for lots of situations like:

• A personal decision in your life
• A critical decision in your business
• Picking a technology or a platform for your company
• ...

Just take a good decision, then make it the best!