Irrefutable Success

At times, all of us make deci­sions based on some­thing other than the truth. I like to think of this as “deci­sional delusion.”

The word delu­sion means “some­thing that is falsely or delu­sively believed or prop­a­gated.”  Deci­sional delu­sion points to action — or inac­tion — that orig­i­nates from poor under­stand­ing or a lack of clear think­ing. The end result is usu­ally not good.

One day, dur­ing a lay­over in Min­neapo­lis, I walked in a book­store to browse the time away. Some­thing caught my eye that made me feel ill. I had been think­ing about writ­ing a book titled Think­ing Inside the Box for a Change, but I had pro­cras­ti­nated. Deci­sional delu­sion con­vinced me that I could always write it later.

The book that jumped off the shelf at me was titled Think­ing Inside the Box. After flip­ping through the pages, I could tell the con­tent was com­pletely dif­fer­ent than what I had been think­ing about writ­ing, but it was still too late. I knew that the oppor­tu­nity to grab people’s atten­tion with that title had passed.

I had missed an oppor­tu­nity because of Deci­sional Delu­sion. I falsely believed that I could always write that book later…so I chose to do some­thing dif­fer­ent. I was wrong, and that oppor­tu­nity is gone.

In the end, a deci­sion to do some­thing now — or to do it later — is either based on absolute truth or it has some com­po­nents of delu­sion. As I men­tioned in “Pro­cras­ti­na­tion is Your Friend,” pro­cras­ti­na­tion is nei­ther good nor bad. It depends on what you do with it.

In this case, because of a false belief, I had made a poor choice in where to invest my time.

That poor choice didn’t hap­pen overnight. There was a time when I could have still writ­ten that book and got­ten away with a lit­tle pro­cras­ti­na­tion. How­ever, I never knew when that win­dow of time slipped away. Not until I saw that book on the shelf.

By the way, I bought that book, as a reminder to myself to not let oppor­tu­ni­ties pass me by.

Have you expe­ri­enced deci­sional delu­sion? How have you over­come this silent killer of dreams?

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Tags: Action, Decision Making, Goals, Procrastination

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 1st, 2010 at 12:07 pm and is filed under Self-Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.