Decision-Making & New Year’s Resolutions
I’m Andy Temte and welcome to the Saturday Morning Muse! Start to your weekend with me by exploring topics that span leadership, business management, education, and other musings designed to support your journey of personal and professional continuous improvement. Today is December 28, 2024.
With New Year’s Eve only a few days away, we’re going to use this final Muse of 2024 talking about New Year’s resolutions. If you’ve been following my musings, you know I’m not a fan of New Year’s resolutions because most are grandiose statements that have little chance of success. As I mentioned last week, recent studies show that 80 percent of resolutions are in the trash by February and that only 8 percent of resolutions are still valid at the end of the calendar year.
In lieu of a rah-rah speech about the wins of 2024 and the promise that 2025 hold for us, today’s Muse is focused on the skill of decision-making. Why? Decision-making is one of the most important skills that you can build for personal and professional career success. It is a higher order skill that relies on myriad subskills such as courage, creativity, communication, analysis, problem solving, compassion, self-awareness, situational awareness, financial literacy, business acumen, constructive conflict, teamwork, and the list goes on…
Personally, we are the product of our upbringing and environment—the time in our lives when most decisions were made for us by our parents and guardians—plus the stack of decisions we make once we begin flexing our independence and reach the age of majority.
Our professional success and the businesses we lend our time and talents to are no different. They are also the product of our environment and the stack of decisions that we make or are made on behalf of the business by its leaders.
On balance, success is the result of making more magnitude-weighted good decisions than bad.
Pause for just a moment on the phrase “magnitude-weighted.” It’s not enough to make more good decisions than bad—the magnitude, impact, and importance of individual decisions must be taken into account. It should be obvious that one really bad decision can outweigh several less impactful good decisions. Weighting matters.
Now pause again and think about how many decisions the average human makes in a day: 33,000 to 35,000 - per day. Most of these decisions are made by our subconscious mind. Subconscious decision-making is driven by how previous conscious choices become categorized as good or bad in our minds. Subconscious biases then accumulate over time that color the way we view the world. The Decision Lab does a masterful job of simplifying and categorizing the scores of biases that populate and influence the decisions we make. I recommend spending some time on their website to learn more about bias and reflect on the biases that may be influencing the 35,000 decisions you will make today.
So back to the concept of making New Year’s resolutions. A resolution is a major decision. It is a conscious decision. In last week’s Muse, we talked about the power of personal planning and the adoption of a continuous improvement mindset. If a New Year’s resolution fits into your personal planning process and your continuous improvement journey and practice, then great! A resolution adopted with an open, agile mind, planning, foresight, alignment with your personal purpose and vision for the future, and is appropriately resourced and funded, will have a much higher likelihood of success.
Alternatively, New Year’s resolutions that are not supported by such scaffolding amount to nothing more than wishful thinking and should be avoided. So instead of making a decision that has a high likelihood of resulting in regret and failure, enjoy New Year’s Eve for what it is—the last day of the calendar year—enjoy the celebration of turning the calendar over. Leave big decision-making to the sober moments of your existing personal planning and continuous improvement process.
Have a wonderful New Year’s Eve and we’ll see you again in 2025!
