The Power To Decide

by Asoka Selvarajah, Ph.D
 (© 2004. All Rights Reserved)

In his classic work, Think & Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill stated that 98% of people are in the jobs they have through indecision, i.e. because they never made the choice about what they wanted to do in their lives in the first place. Sadly, nearly a century later, we can say exactly the same thing.

Decision is the key to transformation. Yet, most of us never learn this from our parents, school, or from anywhere else. It is one of the key character traits distinguishing high performers from the mediocre. If we can make decisions, almost anything we want can be ours.

Think back to some of our greatest achievements, those things we are most proud of and we will see that behind it all there was a decision we made at some point, and persisted with against all opposition, right through to the successful conclusion.

Indecision explains why many feel they have a life purpose, but have no idea what it is. We have lost the use of the decision muscles that should normally enable us to manifest into our reality what we decide upon, and persistently hold in our minds. Ask a child what it wants and we’ll get a long list. Ask an adult and we may well be greeted with silence.

The problem is that all too often people hunger for instant gratification. The ability to engage in delayed gratification, i.e. working hard for a goal “now” in order to see it realized at some point in the future, seems to be a dying art. Hence our ability to make decisions and see them through to a fruitful end has grown weak.

Decision is, by definition, behind every truly great achievement anyone ever makes. Most people who live to be a hundred actually decided at some point that they wished to live to a hundred. Most millionaires, at some earlier point in their life (often when heavily in debt), decided they were going to be millionaires. The Buddha’s enlightenment came only after he decided to seek enlightenment and persisted for six long hard years until he achieved it. Edison decided to invent an electric light bulb and persisted despite 10,000 failed attempts.

Decision coupled with persistence is unstoppable. Napoleon Hill also commented that, in examining the lives of Thomas Edison and Henry Ford, the only quality he found in them that remotely accounted for their success, i.e. was not common in ordinary people, was persistence.

Interestingly, the most successful people make decisions quickly and change them slowly. They persist with the decisions they have made. However, unsuccessful people are very slow to make any decision at all and change the ones they have made very rapidly. Which description applies to you?

It’s not about making the right decision in the first place, but rather about making the decision we have made “right”. If we wait to make the right decision, we could wait forever. If we make our decisions “right”, this means we work with the decisions made, adapting them as necessary to the situation at hand.

Yes, of course it helps to make the best decision possible in the first place. This is where research and accurate thinking come into play. We should do our best in this respect. However, we also need to set some sort of deadline to be prevented from engaging in “paralysis through analysis”. At some point, we have to perform. Thereafter, we adapt our thinking to actual circumstances in order to ultimately bring about what we have decided upon. 

For instance, we may decide to live to be a hundred. We then work with the existing health systems to reach that goal, adapting and choosing what is available to our personal needs.

We don’t give up on the decision itself, although we may give up on a specific means of achieving it, and instead move towards another. Flexibility in the means of obtaining the outcome of our decision is okay. Flexibility in dumping our decisions the whole time is NOT.

The Latin root of the word decision means “to cut off from all alternatives”. This is what we should do when we decide. Don’t leave ourselves a life-raft so we can give up later. A famous example of this kind of decision is Hernan Cortez, in his conquest of Mexico. When the Conquistadors first arrived in Mexico, Cortez literally did burn their boats. There was no way back home. They could only go forward and conquer. That is how just a few hundred Spaniards, thousands of miles from home took on and triumphed over the power of the Aztec and Mayan Empires. Decision!

Decide, and then act as if we could not fail. Interestingly, this attitude of mind attracts forces from the universe that are fully capable of supporting us and bringing our decision into manifestation. If we ask a lot from life, we receive a lot. If we ask a little, that is what we get. The universe has no favorites and does not care either way how much or how little we ask for. Ask and we shall receive, is the way it was once expressed.

The key is to know what we want, decide to get it, and then persist until we have done so.

Asoka Selvarajah is a writer on personal growth and spirituality, and the author of, The 7 Golden Secrets To Knowing Your Higher Self. Subscribe to his FREE e-zine, and get his FREE e-book, Inner Light Outer Wealth at Iwww.aksworld.com/AspireToWisdom.htm?imk=?ILTI .

A Metaphysical, Spiritual, Holistic Publication   |   In Light Times   |   Issue Index