Most of life depends thereon. It needs good taste and correct judgment, for which neither intellect nor study suffices... There are many men of fecund and subtle mind, of keen judgment, of much learning, and of great observation who yet are at a loss when they come to choose.
Baltasar Gracián, 1647 (tr. Joseph Jacobs, 1892)
The observation stings because everyone knows the person it describes: learned, sharp, impressive in analysis, and somehow always standing in the wrong job, the wrong city, the wrong partnership. Choosing is a separate faculty from knowing, and it is the one that compounds. A career is perhaps twenty large choices; a life, maybe fifty. Get a handful of those right, the spouse, the field, the house you can afford, the partner you can trust, and enormous mediocrity elsewhere is survivable. Get them wrong and no amount of daily excellence digs you out. The faculty improves with one habit: choosing deliberately, on paper, against criteria set before the options started flattering you.
Practice
- Fix your criteria before viewing options; options negotiate with criteria and usually win.
- On the fifty big choices, take the tax of slowness: a written page, a night's sleep, one wise voice (maxim 35 sets the scale).
- Study your own choosing record: your last five big calls, and what your process was. Most people have never audited the faculty they live by.
Use this when
- Use this at the fork points: roles, cities, partners, schools, the second career.
- Use it when an option arrives with a deadline attached; manufactured urgency is a tell that choosing well is against someone's interest.
Ignore this when
- Don't apply full ceremony to reversible choices; pick fast, learn, adjust.
- Don't mistake refusing to choose for choosing carefully. Deferred long enough, the choice gets made by circumstances, on their terms.
A picture of it
The flat was beautiful and thirty percent beyond the plan. In the showroom glow, the couple felt the criteria bending: schools could be adjusted, the commute romanticised, the EMI rationalised. They had, years earlier, written their three non-negotiables on the back of a wedding photo, and the flat failed two. They walked out embarrassed and slightly heartbroken. The colony they chose instead cost a third less. Over fifteen years, that gap paid for the things the beautiful flat would have eaten: the better school, the bigger SIP, the freedom to refuse a bad posting.
You are not your talents. You are your choices, compounded.