Your First Choice Is Rarely Best: Five Lessons to Wrong
We are incredibly hard on ourselves when it comes to making the big decisions in life. Whether it’s a relationship or a job , when we’re trying to solve something complex and multifaceted, it’s okay to be wrong. In fact, your first choice will usually be wrong.
This post originally appeared on James Clear’s blog .
For example, consider a few common life decisions:
- If our first five relationships end in a breakup, we think we are destined to be alone forever.
- If we go to school, get an advanced degree, and train for years for a job that we ultimately hate, we feel like failures because we haven’t figured it all out.
- If we have a dream to write a book, create a non-profit organization, or create something of value, and we stumble on the first try, we say we are not good for it.
In cases like this, I believe that being wrong (and knowing afterwards that you made a mistake) is actually a sign that you are doing something right. That’s why.
First choice versus optimal choice
For some reason, we often expect our first choice to be optimal. However, it’s actually quite okay if your first attempt turns out to be wrong or wrong. This is especially true with important decisions we make in life.
For instance…
- Finding the right person to marry. Think about the first person you met. Would this person be the best choice for your life partner? Go back even further and imagine the first person you fell in love with. Finding a great partner is hard, and it’s unreasonable to expect you to succeed the first time. It rarely happens that the first will be the one .
- Choosing a career. What is the likelihood that your 22-year-old self will be able to optimally choose the career that works best for you at 40? Or 30 years? Or even 25 years old? Think about how much you’ve learned about yourself since that time. Throughout life, there are many changes and growth. There is no reason to believe that your life’s work should be easily determined when you graduate.
- Starting your own business. Your first business idea is unlikely to be the best. It probably won’t even be good. This is the reality of entrepreneurship. (My first business idea lost $ 1,400.)
When it comes to tricky issues, such as determining the values you want in a partner or choosing your career path, your first attempt rarely yields an optimal solution . And this was to be expected.
Five lessons on how to be wrong
Being wrong isn’t as bad as we think it is. I made many mistakes and learned five key lessons from my experience.
1. Choices that look bad in hindsight are a sign of growth, not self-worth or intelligence. When you look back at your choices made a year ago, you should always hope to find a few solutions that seem silly now, because that means you are growing. If you only live in a safe zone where you know you can’t screw up, you will never reach your true potential. If you know enough about something to make the best decision on the first try, you are not challenging yourself.
2. Given that your first choice is likely to be wrong, the best thing you can do is start. The sooner you learn to be wrong, the sooner you will discover what is right. In difficult situations like relationships or entrepreneurship, you literally have to get started before you feel ready, because no one can be truly ready. The best way to learn is to start practicing .
3. Divide overly large topics into smaller ones that you can handle. I cannot look at any business and tell you what to do. Entrepreneurship is too big a topic. But I can look at any website and tell you how to optimize it for building a mailing list because the topic is small enough for me to develop a certain level of knowledge. If you want to learn how to make an accurate first choice, play in a smaller arena. As Niels Bohr, Nobel laureate in physics, said: “An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.”
4. The time to trust your intuition is when you have knowledge or experience to support it. You can trust yourself to make accurate decisions in areas in which you have already proven your expertise. As for everything else, the only way to know what works is to adopt a philosophy of experimentation.
5. The fact that failure will occur is no excuse for expecting failure. There is no reason to get depressed or give up simply because you make a few wrong choices. More importantly, you must try your best every time, because it is effort and practice that drives the learning process. They are essential even if you fail. Understand that no choice is doomed to failure, but that random failure is the price you have to pay if you want to be right . Expect to win and play the same way from the beginning.
Your first choice is rarely optimal. Do it now, stop judging yourself and start growing.
Your First Choice Is Rarely Best: 5 Lessons on How to Be Wrong | James Clear