One of the more valuable lessons from Clay Christensen’s great book “How will you measure your life?” was – don’t let life happen to you.
I’ve mentioned a couple of times here that I spent most of 2012 commuting about 3 hours every morning to work. This isn’t best practice by any standard. But, it happened. Now, as I became a regular on the morning train, I got chatting to another regular one morning. He said he’d been doing it for 6 years. When I asked him why he didn’t just move over, I recall he said something about giving this arrangement a try at first and then just letting it continue.
I think this is a great example of letting life happen. Our day-to-day existence can become habitual and, very slowly, the inertia to change things around gets lower and lower.
My best solution to not let this happen is to set up periodic reviews or “tripwires.” For example, if you’re starting on a 6 month trial of a new commute, set up a review in 6 months to see if you want to change things. Do so again in 6 months. In our friend’s case, maybe the results of the review might have agreed with his course of action. Maybe not. But, the idea here is that the first step is to be aware that there is a decision to be made. Even by sticking to what seems a normal course of action, we make decisions against other courses.
Keep doing reviews of your life. And, if you want to take it one step further, consider a 1 week reading week that Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and the like have adopted to just read, review, and set goals for the year.
Sometimes, the hardest part of making a good decision is knowing that a decision is to be made.
A Learning a Day 