You Gotta Make That Choice

In life, you’ll come across difficult situations demanding hard choices. These choices will appear to be like a long-long tunnel where you can see the start and then directly see a light at the end, but you never see what’s inside that tunnel. It’s all dark.

And this is all where your logical mind can take you to.

Your intellect needs information to process in order to produce useful data. And once you are standing at a point where there’s very little information available for you to make a choice. Well, you paralyze. Your mind doesn’t want to choose or in other words, it doesn’t know what to choose.

Should you start your journey through that tunnel with the little information that you have and make sense of the path later as you move through?

OR

Should you wait there eagerly for someone to pass by you in the hope that you will find some more information? It’s like waiting for someone to pass by you in the tunnel and asking that person how’s it going so far in the hope that the reply will be pleasant.

What would you choose?

It’s a hard choice to make. You don’t know how it’s going to turn up. Will you ever make out to the other end of the tunnel?

The Truth Is – You Have No Means To Know It. You Either Make It Or You Don’t.

The situations like these when the outcome is a boolean true or false. You feel scared and that choice becomes the hard choice in your life.

How to make a Hard Choice?

Let’s take an example.

How about a choice that involves big money and uncertainty. A choice for a student to choose his/her foreign university. There’s a lot at stake. If you are from a developing country like India then investing 26,00,000 INR – 50,00,000 INR on education is a big deal. For a middle class family in India, earning this much money could easily take 5-6 years or even more. Investing this money on a 2 year MBA degree in some foreign institution is a big risk.

There are so many questions that pops-up in the student’s head:

• Is there any bank that can loan this kind of money?
• What are the things at stake? Maybe a grandfather’s property that your mortgage for that loan?
• How to make a living in that country?
• Will I find a part-time job? What If I couldn’t find a part-time job?
• What if I couldn’t cope up with the studies?
• Will people accept me?
• Will I be able to make friends with those people?
• What if I failed?
• What if I met an accident there? How would I cope up?
• What if I didn’t find a job after completing my education?
• And a million more such questions…

So much is at stake here.

So many ways you can fail.

So many hardships.

So, should you go for it or wait a little more?

Logical Approach Based On Probability

I would list down all the uncertainities that I have in mind. All of them. Even the smallest of them all.

And then I would start picking every uncertainty from the start. Find out the statistics for that targeted specifically for my foreign university or place.

For example – What if I met a road accident there? (this is only for road accident, other security aspects can also be dealt in the same way)

Now what’s the probability of this happening. A simple google search can give you a lot of insights,

Now you can ask yourself again, could you live with that probability. If Yes then you have removed one uncertainty from the list.

Follow this practice for all the uncertainties that you have.

Not So Logical Approach Based On Faith

Not everyone thinks of their life as a mathematical equation. Human beings have a gift to imagine about their future and make accurate predictions based on that imagination.

We all do this. We imagine, dream, paint a nice picture of our future.

Why not think of the worst as well?

This would give you an insight into what could go wrong and what you can do if it goes south.

By thinking the worst and living it in your dreams triggers your ability to do things that you would have never imagined.

When you skydive for the first time, you never hear the 1. It’s always 3.. 2.. and jump.

But at the end it would come down to the old saying – Have Faith In God And Take A Leap.

You never know whether you would land safely or not, there’s so many things that could go wrong yet the accidents are so minimal. And the fact is that you enjoy the dive. You face your biggest fear and you conquer it. That’s what it is. A Leap Of Faith.

The Most Important Thing

Faith is giving one hundred percent to what you have chosen. Never doubt your GOD. The moment you start questioning your GOD, the faith is broken and you are left all alone.

Here’s a wonderful answer on faith by Andrew Carnegie.

Faith can do things that seems out of proportion. Illogical in the start. Impossible to achieve. Faith is the ultimate thing that drives humanity. Without faith the world would collapse.

And yet we don’t understand how it works. We just know that it works.

Keep Faith, everything will start to fall in the right place.