Leave or stay? Quit or not? To make a decision, you need to weigh all the pros and cons. It also takes courage.
What is a good solution? The one they don’t regret? The one that you thought about in detail, that you thought about for a long time? Let’s not rush and choose a short path… Making a decision means chopping from the shoulder, and this requires courage. This is something from the realm of art, not science. The art of jumping into an abyss and cutting reality in two at the very moment of the jump. Should I retire or not? Vote or abstain? Throw it or not? Precisely because reasoning alone is not enough, it takes courage to make a decision. In vain I weigh all the pros and cons, give arguments, ask for advice – this is not enough. And then I act; I act full of doubts in spite of doubts. “The secret of action is to start taking action,” Alain said gracefully to inspire us. The art of decision-making always goes beyond knowledge. A decision made from a position of reason, ideally justified by a huge number of tables in Excel, is not a decision, but simply a choice. “I chose” and “I decided” are not synonyms at all. The choice requires a reasonable approach, and the decision requires, first of all, the manifestation of the will. And the mind, of course, too, but one that is still not enough and to which the will comes to the rescue. The main thesis of Descartes, albeit this time not quite “Cartesian”: to be human means to compensate for the limited ability of judgment with an unlimited will. That which is infinite within us, that which we can manifest without limit, is will, not reason. Making a decision means wanting more than you know. At the origin of the greatest undertakings of mankind there is always someone who started the path, despite doubts, who wanted to cross the frontier of knowledge; you always have to take risks. If you wait and do not act until you are sure, then you will never begin to act. But risk-taking is not risk-loving, risk-feeling is not risk-loving. Daredevils love risk, they act without hesitation: they are adventurers, not decision makers. Risky, but not brave. The decision maker first looks for reasonable ways to reduce the risk, but he knows very well – the child of Descartes – that his ability to judge is limited, that there are no risk-free situations. He accepts the level of risk that remains. He dislikes risk in general, but loves “residual risk”. He reduced the risk only to accept the “residual risk”. He went to the end only to make it easier to dare to jump into the unknown, into the future, into reality. Here is a beautiful lesson of humanity: one must go forward to the limits of the mind in order to dare to go beyond it. Perhaps this is true mastery: to achieve the unattainable.