Make decisions
My go-to bedside table book right now is The Etymologicon by Mark Forsyth. It’s an absolutely astonishing book. Every paragraph has either a mindblowing fact or a giggle-inducing joke, or both. It’s one of those books that you read only in small amounts in order to relish it for longer.
It’s a book about etymology, obviously.
I must admit, I didn’t think much about etymology (the study of the origin and evolution of words) until well into my thirties. One of the first times I really took an interest was when my friend Matt Church asked me “have you ever noticed the similarity between the word decide and words like homicide, suicide, infanticide…?”
Just hearing him say the words was enough to set off a runaway train of thought (you might hear the engine chugging in the depths of your mind even now). Decide shares a long history with a bunch of words that all mean, in some variation or another, to kill.
Confronting, right?
If you decide to do something, you’re a murderer, at least etymologically speaking.
Okay, that might be a little dramatic. The -cide is drawn from the latin caedere, "to cut”, and to de-cide is to cut-off (which in other branches of the evolutionary tree of words came to mean kill). Whether a decision (note the similarity with incision) kills something or cuts something off, I’ll leave you to decide. Either way, the word has a fairly emphatic character to it and I don’t think that's accidental; decisions can have truly incredible impact.
As popularised in the Gwyneth Paltrow movie Sliding Doors, every moment in life represents a fork in a branch, ahead of which lie many possible futures. Unlike in the movie, of course, where we get to see two different futures rendered in high fidelity, in life we seem to pretty reliably occupy only one timeline. (This timeline seems pretty batshit mental right now I know, but I keep waking up in it so I assume it’s reality!)
The problem with smart people—people with active, imaginative minds—is that these possible futures can be so alluring that we can’t bring ourselves to cut any of them off. A future can seem so bright, vibrant, and worthy… we can’t possibly bring ourselves to kill it!
Yet the ironic result of our hesitation to decide is that while we avoid actively killing some of our vibrant possible futures, we starve all of them to a slow, withering death instead.
Failing to make a decision is the cinematic equivalent of Gwyneth Paltrow just spending the full 90 minutes of the movie sitting at the train station scrolling Facebook on her phone. When we fail to make decisions we fail to create the future.
If you haven’t already decided to sign up to my newsletter (or recommend to a friend that they do), I highly recommend it!
Got a decision you need to make and you’re not sure what to do? Send me a message, maybe I can help.