It might look to you that whenever you say “Freedom of choice”, it’s about the last moment: “Should I eat, right now, this unhealthy but tasty food?”, or “Should I stay late and have fun, or be a party pooper, but have a good night’s sleep?”. Things like that – the last moment, when you make the final decision.
“Oh, if only at time X I had chosen a different path …”.
But, to me, the freedom of choice is mostly not on short-term, but on long-term acts.
If at the end of the day you make a poor decision, there were some factors leading to that decision:
- Perhaps you slept poorly the previous night;
- Perhaps you ate something that day which you are aware generally is not good for you;
- Maybe you generally make poor decisions in the evening, but you keep ignoring the signs;
- (that’s tough!) How about that instead you train yourself in focusing on the long-term, you tend to want instant gratification; instead of working hard, you choose the easy path; instead of committing to the long-term, you focus on the “now”; that’s an important observation, which is mostly ignored – “what made me, at moment X, make the decision, based on habits I reinforced again, and again?”.
The most important observation of this blog post is that long-term decisions affect a lot of short-term decisions. If you’re aware of a poor habit and ignore it, you take some risks. Whenever the risks happen to actually lead to a bad situation, the problem is not only that at that specific moment you took a poor decision, but the fact that you had a long-term habit, which you kept on ignoring.
Most of the time, when people analyze a situation, they focus on just the last bit. If I take a poor grade on an exam, I’ll look at the time of the exam – “Oh, I took a C because I missed just the part which was chosen for the test”. How about you look at a more situation: “I could have slept better in the last year; I could have focused on reading more on the courses; I could have joined a learning group; I could have read extra materials on the subject; I could have written on the matter, so I would have made more associations”.
Why is focusing on the long-term helpful? Because it leads to better habits, and, to me, these are more important than sprints. You can sprint for one good grade on an exam, but it matters more if you can commit to a marathon of lifelong learning.
