I’m a believer that a less-than-perfect decision is better that no decision at all, and try to remain ever vigilant against “analysis paralysis”. I think we oftentimes convince ourselves that decisions are final – that whatever path we take at a given moment in time will irrevocably change the outcome of our future, so we need to be highly cautious about what direction we choose. Don’t get me wrong – there are decisions that do have real consequences in our lives: whether to get married, whether to have children, whether to live close to family. But like they say, where’s there life there’s hope. In other words, regardless of what path we embark upon, so long as we live, we have the opportunity to make course corrections.
In calculus class back in high school I learned about “Newton’s Method”. It’s an approach that Sir Isaac Newton – one of the early originators of calculus – devised to figure out where a function attains the value zero (these are so-called “roots” of the function, or where the curve of the function crosses the horizontal X axis). The method basically has you start with a good guess, and then provides an iterative approach for improving the guess by applying some basic principles of calculus. Actually, the approach is pretty intuitive if you just draw some pictures.
Mathematically Newton’s method is elegant; and I would assert it’s just as elegant philosophically, at least in my way of thinking! 🙂 Rarely do we ever make a decision that gets us to the “root” of the matter – the outcome we aspire to reach. Any decision is just a step in a particular direction; hopefully one guided by our moral principles. The first decision informs the next, and so on, until over time, after several iterations, we achieve what we sought from the start – or at least something pretty close. The point is, we needn’t be concerned about making the “best” decision at any moment in time; in many ways, a sequence of good decisions guided by our principles is probably more likely to yield a better outcome anyway.
So when you find yourself struck by analysis paralysis, remember a little bit of high school calculus, and apply Newton’s Method to move forward.