Stop Wasting Time - Learn to Make Decisions Faster

Every success starts with a decision. The biggest waste of time, the biggest waste of life, for most people is the decision they need to make but haven’t made because they can’t make up their mind.

There is power in a made-up mind. Every one of us is a decision maker. We have 50,000 to 100,000 thoughts a day.

Consider executives. During the year these men and women have to make hundreds, thousands, maybe tens of thousands of decisions. If they give equal value to every decision, no decision is that important.

They may give equal time to a $1 million decision, a $100 decision, or a $10 decision as to a $100 million decision or a $1 billion decision.

Let’s have fewer decisions that have to be made. Let’s resolve to make fewer decisions.

There are going to be more-important decisions, and there are going to be monumental decisions. There are going to be such big decisions that, as you look back on them, you will say the decision was worth making; you’ll say that was the decision that leveraged the results of the company.

Very few people understand the importance of making fewer decisions. You really need to start at the beginning of the year, and figure out what is the one decision, or what are the two or even three decisions, you can make that will take your company, your life, or your business, or whatever it may be, to a completely new level.

For example, last year I moved from Japan, where I had lived for 22 years, to Singapore. When I moved, one of the things I needed to do was to make up my mind about where I wanted to live. That decision was going to affect every waking moment, every sleeping moment of my entire life in Singapore, because that is where I was going to be spending all my time. So I put an incredible amount of time into making the decision about where I wanted to live. I looked at 47 houses before I found one that was going to be exactly the right environment for me. That was a decision that was worth spending a lot of time on.

Then it came time for me to get a local cell phone because I was now living in a new country. I spent exactly zero hours, zero minutes, and zero seconds on selecting a new cell phone.

How did I do that? I told my assistant, “Get me a cell phone.” She asked, “What type?” I said, “I really don’t care; you figure it out.”

What you want is to hire the best. One of the decisions you make is to get employees who are better than you at some things.