"I don't know the key to success - but the key to failure is trying to please everybody" - Bill Cosby

I have a history of being bad at making decisions. It runs in the family, really, but I think it runs parallel to the standards by which we have. Being the youngest member of my generation, I constantly feel pressured to doing well in school, or generally performing well in anything that I do. The decision part of it comes from being OVERLY-thorough in making sure that the steps made are in the right direction. You could say that it is due to the fact that I hope to be making the best decisions in order to make me a more successful, or FIT individual.

It is sort of a running joke between my friends and I over who has to make the decisions of what we will do one night or something, and rarely does that responsibility fall onto me, and I will try to explain why. In given the option between A and B, I lay out the pro’s and con’s of each and try and analyze and visualize the sort of events that might unfold choosing either. Then, once having chosen A, would regret not choosing B and weigh future occurrences against what could have happened. I feel that I am plagued by this because I am really more interested in appearing the best that I can be. It is something that Nowak, May and Sigmund refer to as “the principle of give and take [that] pervades our society” (403).

Being the most Fit to me does not necessarily mean out shining others in one certain field. I would much rather amount the potential that I have be being ready to adapt and adopt to any given situation. For me, that is an extension on the idea of a Liberal Education, and a reason that I chose Plan II. It is that variability that allows one to “bend the universal tree of humanity a little in the direction most favorable to the production of good fruit under existing circumstances” (Carnegie 397). That to me is what deems a person successful.

An additional reason why I often feel pressured by decision making is because I waste considerable amounts of energy worrying about how my friends and family will take the decision and how they will react, or what they will think. This year has definitely been a learning experience in making decisions for myself. It is MY life, and I should only judge myself to my own standards, and by nobody else’s. However, when in constant competition with others, that is sometimes hard to swallow. Edwards Wilson takes about the paradox in saying “that what is good for the individual can be destructive to the family; what preserves the family can be harsh on both the individual and the tribe to which its family belongs; what promotes the tribe can weaken the family and destroy the individual” (410).

I realize that indecisiveness is not something that I alone face, and Matt Ridley also denotes this fact in his Origins of Virtue, comparing the human species to that of other more social animals. “We are far more dependent on other members of our species than any other ape or monkey. We are more like ants or termites who live as slaves to their societies.” It is my conquest as I move forward in life to relinquishes the confines of servitude in trying to please others, and in doing so, hope to be a more Decisive individual making decisions that seem FIT.