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Introduction

Even more than most pages on this site, this is not intended as the 'last word' on the subject. But we do need somewhere to record the most important principles we have learned, to help people make better choices in their lives.

Enjoy, Don't Postpone

Enjoy the ride: take joy in the here and now, don't wait until you have achieved your goal before you allow yourself joy.

Cultivate happiness. This is hard advice, and it can sound cruel: people the world over are suffering in all kinds of ways - how can you advise them to be happy? But the truth is that people can - and have - found pleasure, joy and some measure of happiness in the most dreadful of circumstances. You may not have what you want, you may not be able to enjoy now what you are working for, but there is probably some aspect of the current situation which can be enjoyed; at the very least, you can take satisfaction from the fact that you have not given up and are working for something better.

People often think that happiness is the result of success, but usually it is the other way round: success more often comes to those who are happy; if you enjoy what you do, you are likely to do more of it, and you are likely to get better at it.

Most of us have both good stuff and bad stuff in our lives. We generally can't do much, in the short term, to change this reality. But we can do a great deal to change what we choose to focus on. Focus on the bad stuff only as much as you need to in order to work out how to deal with it, then give your attention to the good stuff; you see what you look for, so the more you look for good things, the more you find; you can choose to be grateful for what you have, or miserable because you don't have more - and this will always be the case, so there's no good reason not to choose happiness here and now.

And most of us want to be popular. Who would you prefer to hang around with: someone who is miserable most of the time, or someone who is happy?

Responsible, Don't Avoid

Recognise that you are responsible for your choices: accept and welcome responsibility, don't avoid it.

Achieving an appropriate balance in the question of responsibility is one of the key foundations of mental health. What you experience comes from three basic sources: your choices; the deliberate choices of other people; and random events, accidents and unintended consequences of other things. You are unlikely to make good choices if you carry around responsibility which does not belong to you - but equally, you cannot learn to make good choices if you refuse to accept responsibility for your own choices.

It is a big and complicated area, but the essential foundation is very simple - a willingness to take responsibility for your choices and your actions. If a mistake was someone else's fault, there is not much you can do; if it was your mistake, then you can learn from it. Perhaps you trusted the wrong person? Then what led you to trust them in the first place, and how can you avoid making that mistake again in the future? You can learn from your mistakes, but only if you are honest about what they are.

And people rarely look for perfection in others. Good, effective people generally trust and want to work with others who are basically competent, honest about their mistakes and willing to learn from them; they rarely want to work with people who deny responsibility for their actions and think they never make mistakes. Opportunities come to those who are willing to take responsibility for their own actions.

Along with responsibility comes accountability: welcome it as a friend. Power is always dangerous, but power without accountability is toxic.

Act, Don't React

The most significant change which many people can make is to choose - in every situation - to act.

The big temptation we face is to react. It's the natural thing to do: something happens, and we react to it. We all have a number of basic inbuilt reactions, which cover most situations. We act on what happens to be the most powerful emotion in the moment; and we protect ourselves (from both physical and social damage) - which means we generally follow the crowd (as sticking out and being alone is dangerous), and avoid change (because the unknown is dangerous). So pause before you react, and consider whether a different response might be better.

The other big temptation is to prevaricate, to postpone, to seek more data, to gain more certainty. We don't want to make a mistake, we don't want to be proved wrong, and we don't want to be criticised. But, in general, it's better to act and make a mistake and learn from it, than to avoid learning because you do nothing. You learn from your mistakes, and you learn from the experience you gain while making those mistakes.

Of course, every now and then, the correct action is to do nothing - to refuse to react is sometimes enough. But choosing to not react in a difficult situation is not the same as prevaricating when a decision is required.

Choose, Don't Change

How do you decide what to do? One basic principle is to choose to make what you are aiming for more likely.

This sounds like common sense, but it's much harder than it appears. For a start, we are usually much clearer about what we don't want, and about the things we want to avoid, than we are about the things we do want. From infancy, we are skilled in communicating unhappiness: I don't like this! I don't like this food, I don't like this game, I don't like this film. We have probably all said to a complaining child, "Okay, what do you want?" and received the reply, "I don't know. Something different."

We are generally clear about the things we don't like and don't want. If we are unhappy, we want the unhappiness to stop. It feels like anything would be better than what I have right now - but that is rarely the case. Things are rarely so bad that they can't be made worse, and it is generally much easier to make a situation worse than to improve it, so just asking for things to change is, at best, a risky strategy.

In other words, stop thinking about the things you don't like, and start to explore the alternatives: what might be better? What do you actually want? You might not be able to get it, or get all of it, but simply knowing what you are aiming for makes it far more likely you will get somewhere close.

Aim, Don't Wish

Aim for something you believe to be achievable.

You may want many things, you may wish for all kinds of things to happen. But many things we want to happen are out of our control - such as winning the lottery, or that incompetent manager at work deciding to leave. So don't waste too much time thinking about what you might do when these things happen: focus your attention on the things you can do to pursue something you want.

The general advice (repeated in many books and videos) is that you should visualise what you want, create a clear mental image of it, imagine yourself enjoying it. That is all nonsense: the evidence is that the more you daydream about the thing you want, the less likely you are to get it. The more you have enjoyed it in your imagination, the more it feels like you have actually enjoyed it, and the less you need to make it happen for real: clear visualisation reduces your incentive to achieve. Clear visualisation also reduces your options: the more specific your goal, the harder it is to hit. Don't keep thinking about what you want, focus on what you need to do to achieve it.

Of course, there is thinking about, and thinking about. Imagining your goal is almost always counter-productive, but understanding your goal can be vital. What skills and resources will you need to get there? What help will you need along the way? What kind of person do you need to be, or to become? What kind of sacrifices will you need to make, and are you sure they are worth it?

Grow, Don't Accumulate

Aim for something worthwhile. You only get one life to live, so why not spend it doing something which is worth doing?

All the obvious targets (such as pleasure, success, power, money and fame) are mostly worthless. You may have seen the bumper sticker, “He who dies with the most toys wins” - presumably it is intended to be ironic, and a challenge to the people who spend their lives accumulating things they don't need, to impress people they don't care about.

There is nothing wrong with aiming to become rich so that you can do something worthwhile with your money - but you probably need to be clear up front what you want to achieve with the money: if you don't know what it is, you won't know when you have gathered enough. Similarly with fame - you can use your ability to communicate, connect and influence people as a means for good, and knowing what you want to do with your fame can help you avoid a lot of the common pitfalls.

And power, of any kind, as we all know, tends to corrupt. It's a dangerous thing to have, unless you have it to serve some worthwhile goal. But what goal? It's not easy to choose, but you are not limited to just one goal in your life - although you do need to prioritise them.

One obvious goal is to grow as a human being - not just gaining knowledge, skill and experience, but also wisdom and compassion. And this will help as you work towards any other worthwhile goal.

Another obvious goal is to make the world a better place. But there are many different ways to do this, and many different ideas of what 'better' looks like.

How do you choose what to spend your life on? It's probably worth spending some time considering the question. And it is, ultimately a spiritual question: no scientific experiment can tell you what to do with your life; no survey or sociological study can answer this for you. Other people can tell you what they have chosen, but they can't tell you what you should choose. However, you can learn from their example: the end result of their choices is often fairly predictable, so you can observe, and ask the obvious question ... do I want to end up there?

The most traditional piece of advice is still good: assume that you achieve your goal, live to a ripe old age and look back at your life - will you be satisfied? Some things will have worked, and some won't, but irrespective of the outcomes, will you be pleased with what you attempted to do?

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Better Choices