Snap Judgment: What Do You Want?

Whether you have five minutes to make a decision or five months, finding the best “answer” is impossible if your core values haven’t already been found. If you don’t know where you want to go, you’ll never get there. On the other hand, many people are content with knowing what they don’t want. "I don't know what I want,” they might say, “but this isn't it." But this is much too easy, much too negative, and a very weak foundation for judgments and decisions.

The psychology of desire all too often is the psychology of fear. People avoid making decisions in the direction of what they want because they’re afraid of not getting it. The truth is, however, that knowing what you want is the first all-important decision you have to make. Furthermore, knowing what you don’t want isn’t good enough. Failure avoidance isn’t something people should really aspire to. At the end of your life, it won’t be much solace to say, “Well, at least I didn’t make any expensive mistakes. Look at my checking account!”

Clarity of desire doesn’t come easily. If it did, making judgments would be much easier. As the sociologist Eric Hoffer once observed, most people are content to simply imitate other people. But imitation doesn’t bring us closer to our true desires – assuming, of course, that we’ve committed ourselves to learning what those desires really are. Have you decided to make that commitment? If not, you may as well stop reading right now.

The Declaration of Independence states that everyone has the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” It’s interesting to note that the original meaning of that last part was quite different from how we understand it today. Originally “pursuit of happiness” meant that nobody had to become an indentured servant. You could undertake whatever work made you happy. “Pursuit” meant “career,” – as in, “he pursued a career in medicine.” And “of happiness” meant “what made you happy, as in, “medicine was his career of choice.”

Today that narrow construction of “the pursuit of happiness” is long out of date. To us, it means we can have sex with anybody we want. We can smoke whatever we want. We can watch television all day. Yes, it’s all up to us – which is both the blessing and the curse. Because in order to do whatever we want, we actually need to decide what we want to do.

As someone once said, "You can have anything you want, but you can't have everything you want." Decide on your real priorities, so they get the attention they deserve in the presence of so many competing distractions. Once you are clear what you really want the most, making progress is a matter of forming clear goals and taking decisive action toward them. There will be lots of judgments and decisions to be made along the way, and most of them will be about deciding to let go of intervening distractions. This process is essential to making accurate judgments and decision. In fact, the Latin root of the word “decide” is from “cedere,” which means “to cut off.”

“To thine own self be true,” said Shakespeare’s Polonius in the first act of Hamlet. Of course, Polonius is pompous, pretentious, not too bright, and perhaps even a little conniving and sinister. But was he onto something there? You be the judge!