Decision making entails understanding trade-offs, assessing the costs and benefits of your chosen option. This article will help you understand how trade-offs can impact one’s life.
Usually, people encounter choices: what time to wake up, eat for dinner, say to my boyfriend, and a lot more. Thus, we always experience weighing trade-offs.
Trade-offs are the choices you encounter. It generates opportunity costs once you have made a decision. When you choose option A over option B, the latter is the opportunity cost. It is the alternative option that you choose to let go of. Every time you say yes to something, you are saying no to something else.
“If you spend too much time working on good things, then you don’t have much time left to work on great things,” James Clear, an author of Atomic Habit, explained the practical definition of opportunity cost.
In making trade-offs, not all people choose the right decision even they examined the costs and benefits of their chosen option.
Is there a way to avoid making bad decisions? Well, knowing what matters most to you will guide you on making better decisions.
When opportunities are being offered to you, it is normal to be overwhelmed. However, give yourself time to reflect and examine what is your priority.
Can I not choose all of these opportunities? It is possible but it is not sustainable. Most people think that pursuing everything will make them successful but Greg Mckeown, the author of Essentialism, emphasized that the pursuit of success can be a catalyst for failure.
Making decisions, weighing consequences, enable you to know yourself more. It gives you clarity about what matters in your life. More than that, it enables you to deliberate various courses of action more accurately.
Sources:
1. https://patrikedblad.com/mental-models/opportunity-cost/
2. https://medium.com/@braeblayde/opportunity-cost-and-the-sad-truth-about-your-failed-dreams-54e58ccc4c89
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