Self-control: How to take control of your time and life?

Chapter 25 Making the Most Important Choice (2)
What is rational choice?While we all know how necessary it is—without rationality we keep making mistakes, being rational and allowing ourselves to feel rational is a near-luxury goal.Few people can proudly say: "I have always been a rational person." Rational choice requires people to use rational viewpoints and attitudes to analyze the problems they encounter, rather than relying on temporary emotions and impulses to solve problems.If you try to do everything well, it's impossible to be great at the things that really matter.

This is not only an attitude towards life, but also a criterion of life.Under this principle, people will walk their own life well.

Scientists have long noticed that people don't behave in ways that the brain can fully comprehend.However, this is how people make decisions in their minds (and not just in choosing a marriage partner, but in many other important aspects of life as well).The decision-making process is, by nature, an emotional process.Generally speaking, people are able to deal with daily affairs, but they are unable to make good life choices. People are often victims of self-over-analysis, procrastination, perfectionism, and so on.Maintaining the security of the status quo is dictated by people's basic posture and inertia.If you can't choose your life correctly, you will face a life in which failure is greater than success.

A person makes a long dragon out of paper.In the narrow space of the long dragon's abdominal cavity, only a few half-sized locusts can be accommodated.He caught a few locusts and put them in. As a result, they all struggled desperately inside, and finally died, almost none of them survived.

This is because the locusts are too impatient. Apart from struggling desperately, they never thought of biting the paper dragon with their mouths, and they didn't know that they could crawl out from the other end if they kept moving forward.Even with its pincer-like teeth and jagged thighs, it didn't help.

Later, he put several caterpillars of the same size into the faucet, and then turned off the faucet, and a miracle happened: in just a few minutes, the caterpillars crawled out one by one from the tail of the dragon.

The death of locusts is because they don't know how to choose, they only know how to keep struggling, but they don't know how to give up. down.

Many people have never been able to walk out an ideal path of life, and always fall into personal shadows at various stages. This is not because their natural personal conditions are worse than others, but because they have no patience to find an ideal path slowly. direction.

Weighing pros and cons is a technical activity
You have to learn to weigh the pros and cons, just like analyzing when buying a house is more beneficial to you.Through trade-offs, you have to learn to give up some things before you can get the most important things.To make the best choice, you must have a certain amount of knowledge about the problem.This is the method recognized by countless successful people, and it is also the safest path.

1. Reason When faced with a choice, we must first use reason to avoid going to extremes, and then use reason to choose the best solution prudently and calmly in a complex and changeable environment.Most of the choices in life are not black and white, either one or the other.We must learn to use the most suitable method to the most suitable person at the most suitable time.Before making a decision, use reason to comprehensively weigh the pros and cons of various factors and your own abilities.

2. Be pragmatic In fact, when you encounter a problem, you just need to patiently disassemble it, see which ones you can influence, and which ones you can pay attention to but cannot influence, and then put all your energy into it and strive for it.We must have the courage to change the things that can be changed, have the mind to accept the things that cannot be changed, and wisely distinguish the difference between the two.

3. Calmness Life is a game of constant choices. It is important that we control the whole process of every decision with a calm attitude.When making decisions and judgments, we must avoid preconceived thinking patterns, and avoid our subjective tendencies from affecting objective and accurate judgments.

4. Self-consciousness is first of all "self-knowledge". Everyone should have an understanding of their own qualities, potentials, strengths, defects, experience and other basic abilities, and have a clear understanding of the role they may play in social life. position.A self-conscious person will neither judge his abilities too high nor easily underestimate his potential.People who judge themselves too high are prone to impetuosity and aggressiveness, are not good at cooperating with others, and have a large psychological gap when their careers suffer setbacks; people who underestimate their potential will be timid and hesitant in their work, and do not take responsibility and the courage to shoulder the burden.

5. Courage When a new opportunity is in front of you, it takes a lot of courage to dare to give up everything you have already obtained.Many people are unwilling to give up what they have and open up new horizons.For example, Ms. Du, a student, has been working in a company in Shanghai for seven years, but she has never achieved her personal goals and her income is very low, which also prevents her from making a decision to seek another job.

In fact, some things seem to be worth cherishing, but the short-term interests in front of you are often the root that hinders you from achieving greater success.When new opportunities come, having the courage to give up what you have already obtained is not a failure, let alone giving up halfway. It is a rational decision to seek new development space.

6. Conscience How to find one's own conscience in the weighing and decision of pros and cons?You might as well think about it afterwards: If tomorrow, what I did was published in a newspaper and read by my relatives and friends, would I feel ashamed?If not, what you do is worthy of your own conscience.

Everyone's opportunities are different, and the team and environment they are in are also different.However, everyone has the right to choose - this will always be the same.As long as you use wisdom and reason to make the right choices, you can be the best version of yourself.

Design the simplest and most powerful actions

Choices will eventually be reflected in your body. Only after studying this course can you realize that actions are more important than plans, and actions may be more important than directions.When we make a choice, the most critical next step is to design how to act.

Making a choice is only the first step, even if it is nothing, only when you implement it and have the most powerful action process, can you truly show your strength.

As we'll see, most people's life goals look similar, such as "build good relationships," "encourage and strengthen my team spirit," "quit smoking," "control weight," and so on.We all have similar goals, which shows that the vast majority of people are not stupid and know what to do, why and how to do it.But most people just can't do it -- can't take effective action.

He will keep telling you: "I'm going to lose weight tomorrow!" However, after spending a hundred "tomorrows", what you hear is still the same sentence, he is still wishing to do something, not already doing it What.If we thought setting goals meant they were automatically achieved, there wouldn't be so many smokers and alcoholics in the world. The key is execution.When many people expressed their ideas to me in the training center, they were very excited, but often they did not touch an execution question: "Why can't I achieve the goals I set?" The reason is actually very simple: to achieve those strategic goals, To complete those strategic plans, you need to make up your mind to start now, get rid of bad habits, and stick to new and correct practices.These changes will make you feel uncomfortable and inconvenient.Only by persisting in this way for a period of time can we reap the benefits of such persistence.

A goal in life is often something that can be done or can't be done, and there is no middle state-unless you are a person who is determined to play life.Just like if you want to reduce the probability of getting lung cancer, you have to give up smoking. There is not much difference between smoking a pack of cigarettes a day and half a pack of cigarettes a day; To execute a strategic plan, but to persevere in high standards to do our best, this is a permanent change, not a temporary movement.

From this point of view, the key to choice is not to set any goals, but to implement them.More worthy of sitting together to discuss the following questions:
“What bad habits should we get rid of permanently?” “What problems should we fix in ourselves?” The atmosphere is cold and awkward, so many people avoid discussing these issues in the training center, but they must be addressed.People need to reach a consensus on the issue of self-discipline.If you can't agree, then don't lie to yourself about life strategy, because you are not going to pay any price of self-discipline for your life purpose.

We need to realize that the execution of choices will always take unimaginable effort.We can't regard execution as a sport, but as a journey without a return journey, and regard execution as a habit in our daily life, as natural as having to brush our teeth and take a bath before going to bed every day.

(End of this chapter)