How to stop making the wrong decision?

[DarklordKyo]

Every decision I've ever made was the wrong one.

Instead of choosing to enter college early via dual enrollment, I decide to stay in high school. Instead of changing my major from Computer Science to IT, I fail my major, and start IT in a community college. Those, and many others, were among the many wrong decisions I've made.

How do people do it?, how do people make the right decision?, what am I doing wrong here?

 

[Queen Michael]

Dude, nobody makes the right decisions. Not ever.

 

[Bobular]

Most people can look back at their lives and point out a load of big mistakes they made, you've just got to be able to make the best with the shitty hand you've just dealt yourself.

 

[Scarim Coral]

You don't. We're not pyschic nor can we see into the future. Sure we all have past mistake that we want to redo or take another path but hey we don't have time machine.

Beside there're no point to dwelling past mistakes other then try to learn from it. You're just making yourself feel bad some more. You can only either try to make the best out of it or try to salvage it.

Oh before you do post some examples of good outcome, they simply had good timing.

 

[Saltyk]

You start listening to me, obviously.

Jokes aside, the best thing you can do is ask others for advice on major decisions. Parents, friends, counselors, and anyone else who has experience with the subject you're asking about. And here's the important and difficult part. You need to actually take their advice into account.

 

[BarkBarker]

Know yourself to an uncomfortable degree in any and every way possible, be a keen observer of other humans in both the current day and the entirety of human history. Wisdom is learned through experience, we have millennia of human experience to study, do so. Be a keen researcher of lots of little aspects of life and maintain a realistic perspective.

 

[CaitSeith]

The only way to make less wrong choices is to do them often and learn from them.

First of all, you have to think on a goal. As the Cheshire Cat said to Alice: if you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there.

Second, there isn't one right choice. Choices have concequences, one of them is how much they steer you towards your goal. If you make one that steers you away, you do something to steer you back on track. It's unavoidable to steer away at some point, so you must plan how to steer back.

Third, don't be afraid of making a bad choice. It's never pleasant to make them, and there is nothing wrong on feeling bad about it; but when you are done, be sure to analyze what went wrong.

 

[Cycloptomese]

This is about the only insight I can offer. I've made a lot of bad/stupid/questionable decisions in my day and looking back... I can tell you that if I'd only done what was more difficult, I'd be better off. Unfortunately, I've always been a "path of least resistance" type of guy.

On the other hand, I'm in a really decent place in life right now, both financially and socially, and I'm pretty sure that most of the good things in my life can be attributed to a combination of blind luck and just showing up to work on time. I've got a great job and I'm married to a fantastic woman and both of those just kind of fell into my lap.

Basically, if you see something that looks like the right place at the right time, move towards it.

 

[Trunkage]

"bad" choices can lead you to make better ones. Something is only a "bad" choice with hindsight and a desire to become better. Another person may have your exact career path and decide that it was good. You cant learn by thinking your doing "good" decision all the time.

 

[Pyrian]

Sooo... You fell off the horse, and then you got back on the horse. Really, that's about the best that can be hoped for. Dunno why you're complaining. Getting things right the first time is not a realistic expectation.

 

[TheMysteriousGX]

You'd need a paradox/butterfly effect free time machine.

Unless you deliberately and knowingly sabotaged yourself, you made the most correct decision you could have based on the information, circumstances, and desires you had at the time. You can't know the future.

 

[DarklordKyo]

Sooo... You fell off the horse, and then you got back on the horse. Really, that's about the best that can be hoped for. Dunno why you're complaining. Getting things right the first time is not a realistic expectation.

I'm complaining because any normal person would've made better choices.

 

[Battenberg]

Sooo... You fell off the horse, and then you got back on the horse. Really, that's about the best that can be hoped for. Dunno why you're complaining. Getting things right the first time is not a realistic expectation.

I'm complaining because any normal person would've made better choices.

All people handle all situations differently, a broad assumption like that is just nonsensical. Like people have said everyone makes bad decisions, retrospectively complaining about those decisions will not help you at all. It's also pretty ridiculous to go onto a forum and expect some kind of all encompassing answer on how to make good decisions or some shortcut to it.

Making bad choices helps you learn to make better ones in the future, that's how it works. Pull yourself together and move on taking lessons learned from your own experience with you.

 

[jasonwilliams]

Dude, we've all made mistakes. There is no one here who is perfect http://biblereasons.com/making-mistakes/. Mistakes are a part of life. The best thing, is that we learn from these mistakes. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger!

 

[Pyrian]

Sooo... You fell off the horse, and then you got back on the horse. Really, that's about the best that can be hoped for. Dunno why you're complaining. Getting things right the first time is not a realistic expectation.

I'm complaining because any normal person would've made better choices.

That's false ("any normal person" lol wtf), and also an unrealistic expectation. A great many people make much worse decisions. A handful of people get lucky. A rather large number of people pretend everything is fine when it's manifestly not.

On the other hand, the decision to continue arguing in this thread may be regarded as falling off the horse and determinedly deciding to not go near any horses again, so... You're actually winning, now, in a sense. "Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they're yours."

 

[DarklordKyo]

On the other hand, the decision to continue arguing in this thread may be regarded as falling off the horse and determinedly deciding to not go near any horses again, so... You're actually winning, now, in a sense. "Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they're yours."

Odd way of putting it, I must say.

 

[Glongpre]

Haha, no one is good at making decisions, let's be serious. No one really knows what is going to happen, but the successful people choose their move based on what information they have, and that's really all you can do. Life is about the adventure man, and it sounds like you have a lot of experience. Use this to guide you in future decisions. It is called wisdom.

Also, I have found that when making decisions, try and go with your gut feeling. It is that feeling you get, where you have a strong urge to choose or go down a specific road. For example, when I graduated high school my parents were asking me a bunch of questions about university, etc etc, but I really had no idea what I wanted to study there (5 years later I still don't know what I want to do, though I will soon have 2 college diplomas in two different areas). My gut feeling was that I wanted desperately to take some time off from education and learn Muay Thai kickboxing. Like it was an intense feeling, and every time I thought about what I wanted to do with my life, my gut kept telling me, "MUAY THAI *****!". So I did it, and damn if it wasn't a great decision.

I guess my advice is, make decisions based on what you want to do, what you really want to do. It is never a bad decision because if it doesn't turn out how you hoped, well you still learned something from it didn't you? And you wanted to do it in the first place because you wanted to know what it is like, you wanted to experience it, and that's what life is all about, experiencing what the world has to offer.

There ain't anything more to the world than that.

 

[Redryhno]

Sooo... You fell off the horse, and then you got back on the horse. Really, that's about the best that can be hoped for. Dunno why you're complaining. Getting things right the first time is not a realistic expectation.

I'm complaining because any normal person would've made better choices.

Any normal person probably would've done much the same honestly. Dual enrollment is not something most people do to begin with. I know for a fact the only reason I actually took the college courses available in high school was because of my (now) fiance. Had absolutely nothing to do with easy credits or getting a headstart.

I know if I'd realized earlier on exactly how terrible of a student I was, I wouldn't have essentially wasted a year at uni before then working my ass off to get accepted into a chef certification course a year late.

"Making the right decisions" isn't something you just magically do. You realize that you made a "bad" one at some point in the (hopefully) near future, and work to correct it if you can, and move on and make the "right" one as soon as you can if it's not possible.

It's not about making the right ones, it's about knowing that the wrong decision is going to pop up at some point, you're going to do it, and you're going to beat the hell out of yourself for it, whether it's immediately, or down the line. Then you're going to slam your head against the wall and go on to the next decision.

I mean, I can't really give you advice on how to stop making them. I can really only tell you that, much like any self-improvement regime, who gives a fuck about if you're going to do it or not, because it's only going to happen if you want it to happen in the first place. So scrape yourself together and do it, or don't.

Take it from someone who has gone through some of what you're thinking right now, the bottom line is not about whether or not you've made the wrong decisions and you're not where you expected to be in life, it's that you want something to change. And hell, you're going through it after you've realized where you believe yourself to have screwed up. You're already ahead of the curve, most normal people would probably still just be rolling around in that fog as they're going through it and not have gone for the IT at community college before hitting the conscious realization.

And give yourself a break, the only way to get better at something is to do it. 10,000 hours is bullshit, but the idea is in the parking lot of the ballpark adjacent to the park cart vendors.

There, I think I made enough paragraphs to fit my quota and make it as stupid as it sounds as I'm reading over it but in a way that is somewhat simple to follow. Hope something helps.

 

[Tsun Tzu]

Wrong person to ask.

Believe me.

 

[DarklordKyo]

There, I think I made enough paragraphs to fit my quota and make it as stupid as it sounds as I'm reading over it but in a way that is somewhat simple to follow.

I think you exceeded your quota, hopefully you get a bonus, lol