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Don’t make New Year’s resolutions. Make new life’s resolution.

Dipesh

We don’t need a list telling us what we should do, but rather a guideline to help ourselves get our priorities in order – such as meditation, exercise, healthy food, and education. Building healthy habits is a long-term commitment that requires daily practice and support from family and friends.

The life we live is made up of a series of choices. What we choose to do and how we live are the things that make our lives what they are. Choices are made every day, often in small ways and with unintended outcomes that impact us emotionally. Life is all about choices. Choices make actions, actions make habits, habits make lifestyle, and lifestyle design life.

Choices either make you or break you. The choice is yours what you want🙃

It all starts with choices. From simple everyday life decisions to your ultimate dream, the choices you make will make or break your life’s trajectory. Choose wisely.

your life is part of a bigger web of choices… It’s your web, how you weave it.

The alarm clock is the best example of choice. You choose to get up early or you can opt to sleep a little bit more. Most of us choose the latter one because it gives us pleasure. We know that waking up early is good for the long run but we choose a short-term reward.

Second, Choices are concerning what to have for breakfast. It is a talk about how we make choices. We are free to choose healthy or junk food. The choices everyone makes will affect their health. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, and our choices determine how we optimize our bodies for health for years to come. The short-term benefits outweigh the long run. We choose junk food over healthy eating, even though we know it will be better for us to eat healthily in the long run.

Morning is the best time for meditation or focusing on something without disturbance. So it’s good to meditate or pray for some time to have peace of mind. But we choose mobile over meditation. Mindless scrolling the screen for reels and videos which again hits our dopamine (short-term pleasure) over long-run peace.

Same for the meal and dinner. we have 2 choices. We can eat a healthy meal or junk food. Again we know what’s good for us. Yet we choose as always short-term pleasure over long-term happiness.

There are some more daily choices that we have to choose. Let’s see what we are choosing…

• Books vs TV
• Exercise vs Mobile
• Learning vs Sleeping
• Work vs Chat/call
• Gratitude vs Jealousy
• Let go vs Ego
• Love vs Anger
• Fearless vs Regret

You are the author of your life, All pages are the different sequences of choices that you made for yourself

Jeff Bezos – The founder of Amazon talked about choices very beautifully. This is a life-changing talk that everyone should listen to. Here I am writing brief summary of that speech.

Life is unpredictable, and we will never know what could have been unless we commit to the unknown. If you reframe the idea of risk, you could become the world’s richest man.

Jeff Bezoz

Sometimes, when we need to remember that it’s the choices we make that matter, we can be quick to point out the gift of cleverness and kindness. But gifts are easy — they’re given after all. Choices can be hard, though. They require effort and work, so if you forget your gifts, you might end up seduced by your own benefits instead of revisiting what could truly make a difference in your life.

Tomorrow, in a very real sense, your life — the life you author from scratch on your own — begins.

How will you use your gifts? What choices will you make?

Will inertia be your guide, or will you follow your passions?

Will you follow dogma, or will you be original?

Will you choose a life of ease or a life of service and adventure?

Will you wilt under criticism, or will you follow your convictions?

Will you bluff it out when you’re wrong, or will you apologize?

Will you guard your heart against rejection, or will you act when you fall in love?

Will you play it safe, or will you be a little bit swashbuckling?

When it’s tough, will you give up, or will you be relentless?

Will you be a cynic, or will you be a builder?

Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?

I will hazard a prediction. When you are 80 years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices. Build yourself a great story. Thank you and good luck!

My wish for your new year is that you will have a far better time than what you had until now in your life.

Now the question is how to choose. How to know what choices are best for us in the future?

How to make choices?

If you can not decide then it’s a clear no.

There are some essential things that help to make good choices.

UNDERSTAND VALUE AND BIASES

All tough decisions are essentially about weighing values. There’s financial value, emotional value, social value, intellectual value, and so on. You have to consider all of them, weighing them appropriately. And not just in the short-term, but in the long term as well.

This “weighting” of values is incredibly difficult, largely because we struggle to see things clearly.

As a general rule, we are all heavily biased toward short-term rewards and emotional value. We are biased toward our pre-existing beliefs and protecting our reputation. And we’re also bad at seeing long-term rewards clearly because it’s difficult to look past our immediate fears and anxieties. Our emotions color everything we see.

Our “default” decision-making also makes it incredibly painful emotionally to give up on something we’ve worked a long time on, or to consider that we may have been wrong for years.

The fact is, we’ve all been wrong for years. We’re all wrong about our value estimates. And until we can be honest about how wrong we were in the past, we won’t learn to make better value judgments moving into the future.

Our “default” decision-making also encourages us to avoid short-term failures, even if that means missing out on long-term successes.

No, the sweet spot in decision-making is to find the short-term failures that enable the huge long-term successes to happen in the first place. Because this is what most people are bad at. And because people are bad at it, this is where most of the opportunity lies…

LOSE ON PURPOSE (SOMETIMES)

Ever hear those stories of wildly successful entrepreneurs and how they had, like, 23 failed businesses before they made it big?

The lesson we’re all supposed to take from this is that persistence and hard work is the key to extraordinary success.

And sure, whatever…

Usually, we can’t help but look at them and think about how “lucky” they got. I mean, Amazon! Who knew?!

What we don’t consider is that out of those dozens of failed, half-baked business ideas were all wagers with limited downside and extremely high upside. That is, if they lose, they lose a little. But if they win, they win a lot.

Let’s say I gave you a pair of dice and I told you that if you roll double ones, I’ll give you $10,000. But each roll costs $100. How many times would you roll?

If you’re not bad at math, you would know that you should spend all the money you have rolling those damn dice.

Most people look at each decision as a single roll of the dice. They don’t think about the fact that life is a never-ending sequence of dice rolls. And a strategy that loses a lot per roll can actually make you a big winner in the long run.

Yes, you will lose the dice game way more than you win. But when you win, your winnings will far outstrip your losses, making it a worthwhile wager.

You can apply the same “risky” behavior in your life to achieve more optimal long-term results:

Propose “moonshot” ideas at work knowing that 90% of them will get shot down, but also that if one of them gets accepted it will be a huge boost to your career.

Expose your kids to difficult subjects at an early age, knowing that most likely they won’t take to it. But if they do, it will give them a huge advantage throughout their life.

Be excessively bold in your dating life, stating exactly who and what you want, knowing that the vast majority of people will not be compatible.

Buy a bunch of difficult books expecting that most of them won’t be useful or comprehensible to you, but also that, occasionally, one will completely change your life.

Say yes to every invitation knowing that most of the events/people will be kind of dull and you’ll just go home early, but that occasionally you’ll meet someone really important or interesting.

When you think purely in terms of the immediate result, you cut yourself off from the biggest potential gains in life. And the reason most of us do this is because of our pesky emotions. Our emotions are short-term biased. They are obsessed with the present moment. And this prevents good decision-making.

Read a book on Decision-making (choices)

Last but not least, the most important thing in making any decision is reading a book on that question. There is no new problem you are facing that was not faced by others in the past.

Research suggests that reading literary fiction is an effective way to enhance the brain’s ability to keep an open mind while processing information, a necessary skill for effective decision-making. Reading helps us to process information better and equips us to deal with ambiguity comfortably. It improves our decision-making by cutting down on the need to make snap decisions, creates a process to infer information better, and avoids irrational judgments.

The Bhagavad Gita is an outstanding example of the decision-making process. Arjuna’s decision to not fight the battle (Chapter 1, Verse 28)1 to his transformed world outlook (Chapter 18, Verse 73)2 determined to take on his enemies. One of the most sorted for quality of a decision-maker is selflessness.

Shree Krishna taught some lessons on decision making which is useful to all generations of people.

1.  Never take decisions on the basis of your feelings.
2. Avoid taking decisions in Extreme emotions.
3. Ask yourself “Am I taking this decision in anger or attachment “
4. Don’t focus only on results.
5. Have Faith in your decision.
6. Keep your goals high.
7. What is good for society is good for you.
8. Trust in God, and trust in yourself.
9. Right counseling can lead to better decisions.

So there are lots of books like the Bhagavad gita which help to make better decisions in any situation. As I have said earlier this year just don’t make new years resolutions but make strong new life’s resolutions. Here are some best books on decision-making.

• Thinking fast and slow: Thinking Fast And Slow shows you how two systems in your brain are constantly fighting over control of your behavior and actions and teach you the many ways in which this leads to errors in memory, judgment, and decisions, and what you can do about it.
• The art of thinking clearly: The Art Of Thinking Clearly aims to illuminate our day-to-day thinking “hiccups” so that we can better avoid them and start making improved choices. Using both psychological studies and everyday examples, the author provides us with an entertaining collection of all of our most common fallacies.
• The atomic habits: Atomic Habits is the definitive guide to breaking bad behaviors and adopting good ones in four steps, showing you how small, incremental, everyday routines compound into massive, positive change over time.

Wish your all years going to be amazing…..