Make Decisions that change your life quickly and permanently

What will you have for breakfast tomorrow? Nope, undecided still? Then we need to have this talk about decisions and how to make them. Trust me, most people do not understand how decisions work. Did you know that if you make conscious decisions about 20 per cent of the things in your life, everything else falls into place? You will perform and achieve more than over ninety per cent (90%) of people in the world.

 

Why Decisions Matter

Decisions are everything. Learning how to make them right, is the difference between being everything you want to become or nothing at all. I know you might be wondering, what does this even mean? Well, lend me your ears, or shall I say, your eyes for a few minutes and I will explain.

Think of chicken in a poultry. They do not think, in the traditional sense of the word think. Their lives play out before them. They have little control over what happens to them. They don’t know what the next meal will be. Maybe, the same thing as always. Or maybe, something else the farmer chooses to feed them. He might even decide to poison them all and they die. He could get hungry and feed them to his dogs. He might just let them live out their lives till they die of old age; a rarity in the world of poultry chickens. 

 

Now, let’s go into the wild and see what life looks like for the chickens there. They don’t fend for themselves. Decide what, when and where to eat. They are not fed medicines at the whims of a farmer. They don’t lay eggs everyday and will live for some years before they are eaten by some wild animal. If it is of any comfort, dying at a ripe old age surrounded by loved ones is still a rarity in the world of chicken irrespective of where they live.

 

Before you ask the question, what do chickens have to do with decisions? Let me ask just one question. If you were a chicken, which would you be, the poultry chicken or the wild chicken? Despite the inability to escape the certain fate of becoming someone’s meal, the longevity and quality of life you have can be different. But it doesn’t happen by chance. It has to be created by the decisions you make or those made for you. 

 

So to be clear. The universe abhors vacuums. The decisions about everything about you have to be made and will be made by someone. That’s our first point. What you wear, eat, drive and sleep in are decisions already made. Most times you may not have invested a lot of thought into it. Never mind, some did that already. I’m sure you can see right though it now, you are either the driver of your own life or someone’s driving for you. But who and why?

 

Nothing happens by chance. Everything happens for a reason and it may not be in your best interest. For starters, breakfasts. Some people invest millions of dollars to convince you to have cereals or eggs or milk as a compulsory part of your day. Grow big and strong with my healthy all in one breakfast product. Without knowing that they are telling the truth we trust them anyway because they also told us that they are trustworthy.

 

To cut to the chase, you have to learn how to make decisions like a boss.And there are  three areas where you can start and trust me. These three simple decisions will set the pace for every other thing that’s important.  

 

Make a Decision about Habits

The first area where you have to make a decision is habits. If you do this right, it solves half of your decision making problems. You see, humans are animals of habits. We can’t do without them. There is not a human alive that is able to survive without a habit. Habits are not necessarily good or evil. What becomes your habit may be beneficial to you in some way or not. My advice always is to choose your habits wisely.

Habits are your natural automation system. When you need to relax, your body swings into the right mood spurring you to do what you need to do. The problem here is that your environment mostly shapes the habits you form. If you live near the ocean, then you probably spend more time on the beach compared to someone who has to travel a hundred and sixteen kilometers to find one. You hang with drug-users, alcoholics and smokers and you might easily tolerate and inculcate those behaviours as habits. There is usually not a lot of thinking that goes into forming a habit.

 

But that can change. Your task is to shape your habits. But how do I accomplish this? Easy, set the ground rules. You are not special. You are just a human being trying to have the best human experience and the ultimate rule to this is simple, less is more. 

 

Be minimalistic. Why eat a different random thing even if you don’t know for sure that the choices are healthy? Find something that works and eat it for breakfast every morning, for example, a boiled egg and black coffee. Choose a uniform and wear it all the time. Do you not see the billionaires, they are mostly boring and do not look flamboyant like peacocks. They keep it simple. You know this is healthy. Be mindful, the goal is to be healthy, so decide on routines that agree with your long term plans. Stay hydrated, eat healthy, work out and whatever else needs to happen. Choose healthy habits and make them into a routine. Simple enough, right?

 

You don’t need to do too much for a start. Find 3 safe and healthy habits to adopt and start applying them. If you successfully do the above, you have come a long way. Pat yourself on the back. You are awesome.

 

Make a Decision about learning

 

The second area where I want you to make decisions is about your learning. What new things have you learned in the past year? How much of that has changed your life in some way. You see most people do not actively learn cultures and that is dangerous. The human mind is like a flowing river, it carries the sweat of swimmers, pee of hikers, dead remains of animals, chemical wastes, lost treasure alongside its flora and fauna. 

Anything you hear, read or experience form a new learning experience for you. Most of those experiences are traumatic but because we easily normalize these kinds of experiences, they become our major learning strategy. Think of this, trauma learning. But like most things, we are not decided on what to learn and how to learn.

 

There are two ways we can start learning. The first is what you already know. Read, listen to e-books, attend a seminar or a conference. Watch youtube videos and basically devote a predetermined amount of time each day to learning. Now I know what you might be thinking. But how do I know good materials that help me learn better? Well, shoo that thought away from your mind. Just consume knowledge voraciously. Whatever you do, don’t stop learning. 

 

Create a learning schedule and give it a timeline. Let’s say you choose to study 145 days each morning. Stay faithful to this. Do it everyday. You can take more time but never less than the stipulated time. Better to do 15 minutes of consistent studies everyday than to study for an hour once a week. The purpose of this endless study pattern is to make yourself into a reservoir of knowledge of a sort.

 

The second way I want you to learn is by reflection. You already know a lot of stuff but you are unable to think critically in the absence of good and sufficient data. That’s why the first learning practice is necessary. As the latin maxim goes, Nemo dat non quad habet (you can not give what you do not have). When you have access to a substantial amount of information, you naturally start comparing things and putting them in the right perspective. Will you become a genius overnight? No! But the sooner you start, the faster you arrive.

 

How does reflection work? This is your soul teaching you what you already know. Here’s my belief, everyone is an old soul and irrespective of what you believe is the origin of life, this applies. If you think that God made man and put his spirit in man, that’s good. We all have a piece of God, the ageless one, right? But if your theory is that some big bang happened and life started, then we can all agree that all energy in existence including you and I originate from that first primal blast of energy that made all things.

 

In your lives some aspects of ageless wisdom and reflection is how you access it. What you do here is the opposite of what you do when you read, write, speak, think, and teach. Not about a specific subject but whatever inspiration you may have. Reflect on what matters to you and you might find that your perspectives on things begin to brighten up. You will see more clearly, think more deeply and speak with more wisdom. The more you do it, the more interesting it becomes but limit your time doing this to a fixed timing; say 15 minutes each day. You will feel like you have more to give, that’s the effect you want to create.

 

Consuming knowledge is the world’s gift to you. Your reflections are your gift to the world. Continuing with this practice over a period of 6 months will convert you to a different kind of human. People will look at you differently and tilt towards you. Your new aura will have people gravitate towards your brilliance.

 

Talking about learning is such a deep and wide topic it would be difficult to cover it in a short piece as this. However, I will work on it in a future piece if this gets noticed and anyone indicates interest in learning some more. 

 

Make a Decision about your Environment

 

The third decision you should learn to make is your environment. Where do you wake up? Who’s the first person you see in the morning? Where do you spend the most time in the day? How do these things affect you? 

Most people are exactly where life puts them. They don’t try to move as though they were trees. Again think of that chicken in the poultry. Does it think of escaping to a life outside in the wide. Probably not. Most people are like that chicken. They lack the means, motivation and mind to move into your best place.

 

I am of the opinion that we cannot all equally thrive wherever we find ourselves. If Elon Musk was planted and grew in a slum in India to a poor, low caste family that can barely feed. He would at best have become a teacher or some tech guy working at some streaming farm or writing content creators on X asking if he can help improve their google ranking. But he was born in South Africa, not to a black poor farming family, but to a wealthy White family. He gets bullied in school but then he moves to Canada and elsewhere until he gets the education he needs to become the most interesting human alive in 2026. 

 

How long have you been in your environment and how far have you come since you started being where you are now? If you have not accomplished much, then you should go elsewhere. When you study the lives of inspiring figures, you notice this same occurence. They often have to leave someplace to go start a new life somewhere else. And a new environment gives them the enablement they have always needed to grow.

 

It may not be just your residence, it could be the city or nation. It may be the job you are doing currently that you have to walk away from. What of the relationship? How well does it help? 

 

Don’t look back. Walk away till you find your green pastures where you take a chill by restful waters. 

 

Your life is not worth living if it’s not peaceful and fulfilling.

 

But it is a decision that you have to make.

 

If you are thinking of  a time to start, I’ll say, now! 

 

If you enjoy reading free books that help, here’s a free gift that makes you a better leader.

 

Let’s say you realise that you are the chicken in a poultry. What would you do now?