I read an interview with a top management executive in which he said he was no different from any other employee of the corporation; as a matter of fact, he did less work than most. What he was paid an enormous salary for was making decisions. And he added rather wryly that his decisions had no better than a fifty-fifty chance of being correct. That stayed with me. I began to think about decision making, and since my habit is to look at characters from the Freudian point of view first—other points of view receive equal time later— I thought that decisions might well be an aspect of compulsion.
But are you born a compulsive or are you kicked into it by background and/or a traumatic experience? Both, probably, but it's better for a story to have a single shattering event bigger the decision compulsion, provided the event ties into the body of the story. I thought of an amusing couplet Manly Wade Wellman had written to the effect that if your girl is one girl in a million, there must be at least six like her in a city of any size. Good. It'll work and lock in to give us a chase quality. It will also provide conflict, mystery and suspense.
"Decision-making is the selection, based on some criteria from two or more possible alternatives." - George R.Terry
"A decision can be defined as a course of action consciously chosen from available alternatives for the purpose of the desired result" -J.L. Massie
Decision-making is the act of making a choice among available alternatives.
There are innumerable decisions that are taken by human beings in day-to-day life. What's the very first decision you make each day? For some it comes while still in bed. "Should I get up or hit the snooze button?" We make thousands of decisions every day. Many are easy, but others are complex, stressful, or both. Because there are so many decisions and because they are literal forks in the road with dramatic impact on results, costs, time, feelings, and relationships, how you make decisions is extremely important. Most of us need to be pushed to the wall to make decisions. And once we reach this point, we have to deal with the conflicting emotions that come with making them. We have reached a fork in the road. Now this fork can be a two-prong, three-prong, or even a four-prong fork. No wonder that decision-making can create knots in stomachs, keep us awake in the middle of the night, or make us break out in a cold sweat.
Making life-changing decisions can be likened to internal civil war.
Conflicting armies of emotions, each with its own arsenal of reasons, battle each other for supremacy of our minds. And our resulting decisions, whether bold or timid, well thought out or impulsive, can either set the course of action or blind it. I don't have much advice to give you about decision-making except this:
Whatever you do, don't camp at the fork in the road. Decide. It's far better to make a wrong decision than to not make one at all.
Each of us must confront our emotional turmoil and sort out our feelings.You cannot make progress without making decisions. Making choices and decisions are a part of life. Simply put, the way life unfolds, with its twists and turns, starts and stops, requires us to make choices and decisions every step of the way. So, I find it fascinating, and somewhat baffling that by the time young people have reached adulthood many have not mastered the art of decision-making.
