Sepia & gold

What it could have been is not what it would have been.

You probably know my story by now.

• Worked in finance for 6 years.

• Quit my job one morning.

• Moved to Hawaii.

• Started writing.

Four bullet points. Easy, right? Nice clean decisions I can stack up and lay out.

Concrete actions. Black and white.

But, of course, that’s not how it really happened.

Between each of those bullet points were mountains of internal struggle and oceans of invisible nuance.

There was gray area. Doubt. Enough “what-ifs” to get to the Pacific and back.

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In life, we all want to make the best decisions. As humans, we crave certainty.

But there are a few problems with that:

1. Clearly defined best decisions rarely exist.

2. Outside of death, taxes, and cliches, certainty doesn’t exist.

So instead of taking action, we stagnate. Because it’s easier to let life happen to us and accept the outcome than it is to make changes and put ourselves in potentially negative situations of our own doing.

All of this — the doubt, the uncertainty, the stagnation — is a function of being scared to make the “wrong” decision.

But “right” or “wrong” is subjective. The only objective truth about life’s paths is that each path has a best possible outcome — and you have the ability to find it.

Was it the “right” decision for me to leave a salary, benefits, and six years of career progression?

I don’t know.

But it doesn’t matter.

Because the second I made that decision, it was my responsibility to find the best possible outcome of that path.And that meant not dwelling on what could have been.

Remember: The grass will always be greener on the other side.

And since humans are hardwired to avoid pain, your mind isn’t going to create hypothetical nightmare scenarios about the path you rejected. It’s going to create fantasies — and it’s going to make things seem better than they were.

So when it comes to making big decisions, keep a few things in mind:

1) The path you chose not to take will always be drenched in sepia and glittering with fool’s gold, but that’s just a mirage. There’s no way to know what would have happened.

2) The decision you made was the best one you could with the information you had at the time.

3) Since there’s a best possible outcome for every decision, the decision isn’t the most important part — your response is.

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I can sum up one of the most impactful decisions of my life in four neat bullet points. But those bullet points don’t show the years I struggled over which path to take. They don’t show the endless hours of prayer and phone calls with family. They don’t show the uncertainty that clouded every step.

They don’t show that the catalyst to finally pulling the trigger was a simple realization: The right decision wasn’t going to clearly reveal itself — because the right decision didn’t exist.

So next time you’re at a crossroads, just remember: Regardless of what decision you make, a best possible outcome exists.

It’s up to you to make that outcome a reality.