The Benefits of Smart Choices
Last week I invited South African Grade 11 learners (2025) to optimise their lives by making smart life and leadership choices.
The invitation is constructed around the truism captured so clearly by Robert Foster Bennett, quoted below.
Your life is the sum result of all the choices you make, both consciously and unconsciously.
If you can control the process of choosing, you can take control of all aspects of your life.
You can find the freedom that comes from being in charge of yourself.
The most vivid demonstration of how smart choices return ever-growing rewards throughout life is the ‘magic’ of compound interest, illustrated in the infographic below.
The tousle-haired Albert Einstein is supposed to have said that ‘Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it; he who doesn’t, pays it.’
Of course, the inverse is also valid. Heedless choices tend to trap us in a spiral of decline, like ever expanding debt.
The link between smart choices and Leadership is through the ‘choosing process’ that Bennett refers to.
The Influential Leadership System’s underlying process is Social Agency, which is the capability to:
- think critically,
- make smart choices, and
- act productively (to achieve beneficial outcomes).
Social Agency’s three-step process is essential if we are to enjoy ever-expanding productive outcomes, i.e., the benefits of growing and reinforcing smart choices.
I leave you with the words of David Foster Wallace, who captures the emotion of how our choices distil our lives to the very end.
I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day.
Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose.
And I’m starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life’s sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down…, all struggle for naught, drowned by time.
It is dreadful.
But since it’s my own choices that’ll lock me in, it seems unavoidable—if I want to be any kind of grownup [a person who has reached the age of reason], I have to make choices and regret foreclosures and try to live with them.
Of course, the best news is that it is never too late to start with smart choices—today, right now!
Regards,
Colin @ Karoo
We Activate Leadership!
Leadership Weekly Note: 4124.061024
e: colind@karoo.world
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