Taking Sides and Making Decisions
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Back when I was working for “the man”, it was far easier to continue down that path than to change my course. Life wasn’t too bad. Bills were paid, life was easy, but there was something missing - passion. Fast forward almost three years and I’m glad I left. I’m now making a living working with beautiful technologies (Ruby, Rails) and have assimilated with a bunch of great freelancers who “get me”. My eventual shift in course was due to one single hard decision, the decision to leave the confines of my employer and my existing mindset, and head off in to the blackness of uncertainty.
Often decisions are imperfect. They require taking a side based on imperfect knowledge, and then taking a leap of faith. At the time of leaving my employer I had no way of knowing what the future would hold, but I rationalised my decision and jumped!
You have to take a side to make a decision. I took the side that it was worth jumping ship. I rationalised the decision by imagining what I might think on my death bed had I stayed under the auspice of full time employment.
Sure, my decision was totally irrational founded on nothing but wants and desires. But hey, beyond the basics of survival, that’s all decisions really are: trade-offs between what you want but don’t really need, and the effort and risk required to fulfil those desires. In these situations it’s only ever an optimisation problem that yields a best guess, and not a perfect solution!
Here’s the kicker though. Things worth doing require decisions, and decisions mean taking sides. So if you want to do things worth doing, then you’ll need to start taking sides, and taking sides mean imperfect decisions! Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
Life is imperfect. Get over it. Once you stop the bullshit belief that you can make perfect decisions it’s much easier to jump.
