Deciding

A niece of mine, an adult but very young, was forbidden by her father to eat foods that might carry listeria: cheese, ham, cold cuts in general. I suppose with this swine flu business they’ll end up going kosher. It’s fine to worry about your kids, but some parents overdo it and don’t let them grow up.

As you grow up you have to learn not to always obey your parents, because 8 out of 10 of their pieces of advice are right and 2 are completely wrong, but if we don’t take the risk of disobeying them we’ll never know the deep wisdom the years gave them, and which we haven’t acquired yet (that’s called experience). Being wrong is a right. If they love you, they will accept your failures and won’t lecture you with the “we told you so” I find so obnoxious.

Don’t believe me.

Seth Godin says “you’re nuts if you believe me”:

“I’m the first person to admit that compared to you, I have no idea what I’m talking about. You’re there, doing what you do, and doing it with skill.

Let me be really clear: My job is not to tell you what to do. I don’t know what to do. You do.

Not just me, of course. Everybody with a blog or a book or an interest in your success. Don’t do what they say. Listen to their questions instead.

My job is provoke you into asking hard questions. Ask those questions to your boss and your co-workers and yourself. It’s easy to show that self-aware decisions and thoughtful strategies outperform blind stumbling.

I don’t have a lot of patience for this list of seven rules or that manual of how it’s supposed to be or the step-by-step road map you can purchase today only. I think you’ll do a lot better if you get optimistic about the future and cynical about pat answers at the same time instead.

The decision is yours

Being an adult means deciding for yourself. Not letting others make your decisions for you, even if you depend on them financially, as young students do.

Deciding which path your life will take is a hard decision, a rough one, and it can even be painful. But it is actually more painful for the parent who won’t accept that his child is free than for the child, once he feels released from the heavy load of his parents’ projections. But if there is love, those pains will pass.

But making decisions means taking responsibility for them, and that is why making them is scary.

Gene Roddenberry, the original producer of Star Trek and of so many successful TV series in the 60s and 70s, used to say that he acted like a lion all day, even though when he got home he trembled like a mouse in his bed. Because every day he made thousands of decisions that could affect the future of his projects and of the many people who depended on him.

You have to be like a lion, because decisions mean we will face problems, thousands of problems, and we will run into obstacles beyond our strength and our abilities. It’s always like that. Randy Pausch reminds us that the brick walls are there for a reason.

That is what being an adult is: making decisions, and taking responsibility for them.

When you’re an adult nobody is going to make the decisions for you, not even your parents. And if you expect them to make them for you, or if they keep making them for you, you are still a little kid; they haven’t let you grow up. Parents who love you let you grow up. They know you are free, and that they can’t decide your life for you.

You can ask for advice, from your parents, your relatives, your friends. You can read Seth Godin’s blog, or buy a self-help book, but the decision is yours.

Listening to advice helps. Knowing how to filter the good from the bad matters. Making plans, figuring out how to face change, preparing strategies: all necessary.

What matters is making the decision and carrying it out. Don’t stand still, static, doing nothing.

Remember, the only thing worse than starting something and failing… is not starting anything.