Make Better Decisions by Raising Your Endurance for Tedium

Posted on Posted in Personal Growth and Self-Leadership

The following is an excerpt from the chapter, “Hitting the Wall“, from Naked Thinking, how to tame your emotions, focus your thinking, improve any relationship and make decisions you’ll never regret!

While there may be several aspects of decision making this concept {raising your endurance} will apply to, let’s just focus on one; namely, hitting the wall when it comes to doing our due diligence before making the decision.

To me, this is one of the hardest things to make myself do. I find myself thinking about what all I need to do and know and begin the chore of gathering the information or getting the input or advice I need to hear from others. Very quickly, however, I find my patience runs thin and I get on with making the decision without having completed that diligence due the magnitude of the problem or issue.

Some decisions can be very significant. An example would be buying a new car. You are about to spend money to the tune of a significant portion of a year’s work, and yet, some people do this the very first time they see a car they’ve never heard of before. They have no idea what the car is really worth, if it really has all the elements they were looking for (like safety features, gas mileage, repair costs, etc.) but the sales rep really painted a great picture.

They started out hardened against any sales pitch, yet within half an hour of talking to a “non-salesy” salesman, they find themselves signing papers committing to thousands more than they said they’d pay for a car they never heard of before they got there! Why? Why would you, or anyone, spend as much money as you might make in a year on a car you just heard about for the first time? The answer is as simple as you have a low endurance for the tedium of doing your due diligence.

If your endurance had been higher, you would have said thank you, taken his card and gone home and scoured the internet for everything you could find out about this car and the price. You would have read as much negative information as you could find to uncover problems the salesman didn’t bring up; after all, his job is to get you to buy it, it’s your job is to do a good job choosing it.

You might have waited three days to get over the excitement of buying the car right away. You might have called two or three other dealers to see if they were willing to sell it to you for less money. The list goes on—but not forever. It just feels like it would, so you just go ahead and do it.

Decisions that have profound impact on your health, happiness, family, money etc. are due a great deal more diligence than deciding whether to have pork chops or Salisbury steak for dinner; yet, some take the same time to make that choice! You must find a way to increase your ability to not make a decision at all until you’ve done what you must in order to make a decision you will be happy you made and not regret.

Reread the steps outlined in the story. Create a process complete with elements regarding your due diligence, like stating you won’t make a decision for some expressed amount of time or until you’ve talked to a certain number of people or you’ve read a specific amount of information. Follow those steps no matter what. Even if you are absolutely convinced your decision will be to “do it”, whatever that is, force yourself to not do it until the criteria of your process is complete.

To some, this will sound like a very inefficient way to make a decision, but this is about building endurance.  Once that’s done, decisions you make in the future will all benefit from your having done so.

~Excerpted from: Naked Thinking, © Phil D’Agostino

38 thoughts on “Make Better Decisions by Raising Your Endurance for Tedium

    1. Thank you for your kind words. Please do come back. I will be posting here regularly from now on. Also, please see these issues and many others addressed in greater detail in my book, Naked Thinking at NakedThinking.Com. Be well and have a truly positive day. ~pHil

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