The art of decision making

People are born with certain characteristics and talent. What they achieve in life from that point is probably influenced by these things
1. How much they work
2. How they acquire new skills
3. External Factors and Luck
4. The decision that they make.

There is very little you can do to change three and if want to maximize your lifetime achievement 4 will be guiding 1 and 2. So let us treat 4 in detail.

If we were to put mathematically the strategy to make decision, how would it be?

At birth an individual has certain inheritance, qualities and potential. Based on this he will acquire certain skills and enjoy certain privileges. Every decision that he makes should follow the following rules.

1> The decision increases his options
2> The decision brings him success

The metrics of success might be personal satisfaction, wealth, joy, power, place in history, influence on masses, contributions to society, invention and innovation.

Not all decisions increase ones options. When a person has experimented with something and has realized that he has special talent or no talent for that thing, he makes a decision to close some doors. This leads to specialization where he can concentrate on doing more experiments and utilizing his talents.

To make this argument clear, in a free society, a newborn child can pursue any career option that is known to the mankind or create a new one. After a few years the child exhibits some flare in sports or radiates intelligence and spends more time doing certain things than most other kids. Now if his guardians make the decisions on her behalf to explore some early specialization, this closes some career options to the child but this is the calculated risk that they take to achieve some outstanding success. Now if another child just follows the majority, all the existing options are preserved for the child and he may lose a few of them with age until he makes some conscious decision to diverge. People do make decisions that make them a bit different from the others at some point of time and this is the way they end up in different roles in the society so that they can coexist and complement each other.

-incomplete - to be continued