Daily Inspiration: “The most important decision you should always make is the next one!”

“The most important decision you should always make is the next one!” – Futurist Jim Carroll

(Update on THE GREAT INTERNET OUTAGE OF 2022 – For the first time since August 2016, I have not managed to get my Daily Inspiration out first thing in the morning! There is a MASSIVE Internet outage in Canada involving our largest Internet service provider. I’ve managed to get a connection over at my son’s neighbor who is on another provider; my son, his wife, and I are in the backyard with connectivity!)

I was out for a round of golf with my son and one of my new neighbors, a 14-year-old young man. He isn’t quite new to the sport, and is still in the early stages of what will eventually be a great game. On the other hand, my 27-year-old son is a fantastic player with a handicap that hovers around 1 – for nongolf fans, that’s extremely good! In my case, I use the game of golf as a personal motivation factory, constantly working away to always try to do a bit better.

This young fellow had fantastic swing mechanics and a lot of potential but was missing a few shots through the round. He might have been nervous playing with my son; it can be intimidating to be out with someone who is really good. To encourage him, I made sure to encourage him with a phrase that is often used in the world of golf.

“What’s the most important shot in golf,” I’d ask him. “The next one!” he chimed in, repeating the lesson that we remind ourselves of so often out here. I repeated the question to him every once in a while after he had a challenging shot. I hope I wasn’t annoying!

So too it is with the decisions we are faced with on a regular basis.

The most important decision we should *always* make is to make sure we make the next decision!

Sometimes, our decisions will go wrong, and they’ll make us leery of making another one. In other cases, we might not want to make a decision because we have imperfect information or a complete absence of information. And then there are those moments where we might have made a decision, but that leads to the necessity for another, far more complex decision that we did not anticipate – and we get scared off.

The challenge that occurs with these situations is that we then become very leery of actually making a decision! We postpone it, delay it, or avoid it altogether. That never ends up well – it leads us into the land of indecision, a challenging world in which we become stuck, a hostage to uncertainty. Years ago, I coined the phrase “aggressive indecision” to describe this state of affairs, and this unique attitude can creep into your mindset, smothering your ability for action and stifling your opportunities for success.

That’s why you’ve, at times, you must force yourself to make a decision, with a conscious awareness of the effort it might take and the challenges that will exist if you do not.

So just as the next golf shot in your game is always your most important shot, so too are the decisions that you make each and every day!