A lesson I’ve learnt from years of reflecting on my emotions every day is to not overweight emotions from any given day.
Put differently, don’t make irreversible/hard to reverse/expensive decisions based on a day’s worth of data. For such decisions – e.g., buying something expensive, committing to a time intensive project, getting married, hiring someone, having a kid, or quitting a job – there is little upside from making a hurried decision. Especially one made on the heels of a bad day.
We all have bad days. Some days are monumentally bad. But things often turn around quickly enough – sometimes on a dime and often faster than we expect.
If things don’t look up after a bit of time (say 2 weeks), it is worth asking the hard question. If things look stubbornly bad after a month, it might be time to make a decision.
The key is to take the emotion out of key decisions. For most of us, that helps get rid of enough noise so we can pay attention to our gut.
Rash or “rage” driven decisions rarely lead to good long term outcomes. And overweighting negative emotions on any given day is a recipe for rash decisions.
