In the most recent publications I talked about decisions, those that in the first instance we think are quite important due to their transcendental condition, but that later are not consolidated with this, and also those other decisions that are of a more casual nature, that we usually cannot prevent, and to which we do not confer great importance, but that later are revealed as decisions that change our life in some significant way.
Now, in this last post about decisions I want to talk about the approach we take to decisions that are naturally insignificant, but which become important decisions when repeated many times over time.
These are decisions that go unnoticed due to their monotonous nature, we are usually thinking about something more important, and that separately do not have a great effect on our lives, however when we repeat this action every day, or every week, or every month, or every year, we reach a situation becomes a very important decision.
From a first point of view it may seem that I am repeating myself, and that this is the same situation that I discussed in the previous publication, but this is not the case. Let's clarify it with an example.
Suppose that in our monthly balance we have a surplus of $500, and we decide to save the money instead of spending it. Over a period of one year instead of having nothing we will have accumulated $6,000. However, this seems pretty obvious still, but what if instead of saving in fiat money and losing 1.2% in value, we decide to save in crypto; Bitcoin, Ethereum, Hive. What would be the result then, what would be the result in five or ten years? If we save in dollars for that amount for ten years, assuming that inflation will remain all that time at that same level, which as we know is not the case, this will be costing us a lot. Yes, we will have a financial cushion that will allow us to face some emergency, but we will also lose some value in the long term.
Instead, if our decision were to save in crypto it would likely be very different. Instead of having $60,000 saved after ten years, with which to perhaps pay a portion of college tuition or mortgage, we will have obtained value instead of losing it, and instead of having a simple financial cushion we will have acquired economic freedom, not only on a personal level but also on a general level as a society.
This situation differs from the previous publication because separately this decision does not produce a transcendental change, however, although the effect of a decision is small, when we continue making that same decision over others for a long time, in the long term the small effect becomes bigger and bigger and sometimes multiplies exponentially. So the real decision is not in choosing whether or not to save crypto this month, but in the decision to continue every month for a long time. When we brush our teeth we only do it once? We don't, do we? We know we are going to make the decision to brush our teeth during every day of our lives. So why do we forget that when it comes to everything else?
Our approach then should be to look at all those small decisions we make on a daily basis that appear to be insignificant, and try to understand the impact it will have on our life if we continue to repeat that decision over and over again.
Once we think about this, and pay attention to the decisions we make all the time, both the seemingly big ones and the casual or routine ones, we understand that the distribution of attention is unevenly distributed, that we usually give more importance than we should to one type of decision and not enough importance to other decisions. A small change in our approach to this may be what we need to make a difference in our lives.