#10 – When you make the wrong decision, try to correct it, instead of continuing down the wrong path.

You’re a human being.  Okay, that’s obvious.  However, as a human being, you will make bad decisions in the course of your life.  That’s a fact.  What I’ve learned (in making many bad decisions) is that once you make a bad decision, and you recognize that it’s bad, the next steps that you take are critical.

You can ignore the bad decision, and keep going with it, which will inevitably make things worse OR you can try to correct it as best you can.

Here’s an example…

Let’s say that one day you were supposed to come home immediately after school and do your homework because you had a sporting event later that evening.  After school, your friend asks you to go play basketball for a while.  You know what you’re supposed to do, but you really want to play basketball, so you go with your friend.

About 15 minutes into playing basketball, your parents are calling or texting you, looking for you.  You’ve realized you’ve made the wrong decision by playing with your friend and you are faced with two options:

1. You answer the phone or call your parents and explain to them that you made a bad decision and you are going to immediately come home and start your homework, OR
2. You ignore the calls, keep playing basketball, and deal with the your parents later on.

I can’t speak for all parents, but if it were me, and you chose Option #1 above, I would thank you for being honest, ask you to come home right away, and would have a conversation with you at home to help you make better decisions going forward.  If you chose Option #2, I would probably get very mad, and punish you which would mean no time with your friends for an extended period of time and you would lose my trust, which is valuable.

You see, by choosing Option #1, you are admitting that you made the wrong decision and course correcting, preventing yourself from going further in the wrong direction.  This is a very important concept because you will make bad decisions, there’s no doubt about it.  The question is, how will you respond to them.

Always course correct.

Love,
Dad

P.S. There will most likely be difficult consequences for course correcting.  In the example above, by leaving the basketball game early, you may upset your friend, but that’s a consequence you’ll have to assume to correct for the initial bad decisions.  If you would have told your friend the truth from the beginning, they probably wouldn’t have been upset at all and would have just agreed to play basketball on another day when you were free.