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This Midweek motivator is designed to pull you out of the post-weekend slump, and share inspiration and entertainment from women crafting away at their dreams. This week looking at decision making, and avoiding regret ft. one of my favourite writers (above) Ayn Rand. A divisive philosopher with a brilliant mind (IMO). Her epic, The Fountainhead, is one of the few fiction novels that really impacted me.
“I regret nothing. There have been things I missed, but I ask no questions, because I have loved it, such as it has been, even the moments of emptiness, even the unanswered—and that I loved it, that is the unanswered in my life.”
Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
On decision making…
I truly believe that life is too precious to have regrets.
I also believe you can only really live without regrets if you’re active in the decisions you make. If you know consciously in the present why you are making a decision, then in the future you will also know why you made that decision.
To live without regrets, you need to live actively rather than passively. You need to make sure your life happens for you, not to you. If you’re present in your relationships, your career choices, your faith, and your routines, you know that there is choice in the way these exist in your life.
Along our journeys we’re often faced with difficult decisions. It may be moving to another country for a job or having a career change at an unconventional moment.
It may be how close we live to elderly family members or whether to move back into your parents temporarily in order to save money (a la my Devon/Cornwall experience).
Personally some of the decisions I’ve found most agonisingly difficult have been relationship based. I’m unhappy, but I’m in love. Should I stay or should I go? I’m perfectly happy, but something’s missing. Should I stay or should I go?
The central reason decisions are difficult to make is because we are making a decision unsure about what matters more to us in the toss up. There are elements of both paths which are attractive and elements which aren’t so attractive.
If we can take the specifics of the decision away and look instead at the values underlying the decision, then the right path starts to become clearer.
For example…
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