Sunday, September 28, 2008
Decisions
There are a lot of factors that influence your life on a day to day basis. The activities that you participate in, the places that you travel to, the people that surround you, … all of these elements combine together to shape your identity. Good or bad, right or wrong, it’s who you are and it’s how others will perceive you. Although you can’t control what these outside forces will do, you still have one thing on your side that will give you a little control over the direction that your life will take… the ability to make decisions. You are faced with decisions that you have to make every single day. If you don’t want to do something, don’t do it. If you don’t want to go somewhere, don’t go. If you don’t like the people around you, change them. It’s your decision. Sounds simple enough… but sometimes you can take for granted the results of your decisions. You can get caught up in the “it’s all about me” or “nobody is going to tell me what to do” frame of mind. You sometimes focus more on the short term gratification rather than taking a look at the long term consequences. Not only do the decisions that you make influence your own life, but they can also be that outside force in someone else’s life. Think about it, something you do or say today could change the course of someone else’s life tomorrow. That’s a pretty big responsibility to have. Sometimes you will make good decisions and sometimes you will make bad decisions. You may not ever see or realize or even care about the results of your decisions… but the results do exist. The results are real.
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Too many people today focus on the short term gratifcations for themselves and think nothing about how their decisions affect others. I call them egocentric defined as (a) the incomplete differentiation of the self and the world, including other people and (b) the tendency to perceive, understand and interpret the world in terms of the self. The term derives from the Greek egô, meaning "I". An egocentric person has a limited theory of mind, cannot fully "put himself in other peoples' shoes," and believes everyone sees what he/she sees (or that what he/she sees, in some way, exceeds what others see). They also fall into the idio-centrics category. Then there are those, like us who carefully weigh every decision and try our hardest not to adversely affect other people. We are allocentric characterised by or denoting interest centered in other persons rather than in one's self. I'm glad we don't have such a limited mind aren't you?
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