The Art of Making Decisions - Alan Watts

[Music] because finally as I pointed out you do not know where your decisions come from they pop up like hiccups and when you make a decision people have a great deal of anxiety about making decisions who's this guy who farmer who ordered a help man come in and found he was an extraordinarily efficient worker because the first day he put him on sawing logs and he saw more logs than anybody had ever saw it was fantastic but they were all done in one day so the next day putting on put him onto mending fences and

there were all kinds of broken fences around the farm and in one day he had the whole thing done so I thought what am I going to do with this guy so he took him down into a basement and said look here all our all the potatoes that have come in from this Harvest and I want you to sort them into three groups those that we sell those that we use for seeding and those that we throw away so he left him at that at the end of the day the laborer came back and said

well that's enough mister I quit oh he said you can't quit I've never had such an excellent weather I'll raise your salary I'll do anything to keep you around me I said no it's all right mending fences and chopping wood but this potato business is decision after decision after decision after this [Music] foreign so when we decide we're always worrying did I think this over long enough did I take enough data into consideration and if you think it through you find you never could take enough data into consideration the data for a decision in any

given situation is infinite so what you do is you go through the motions of thinking out what you will do about this and then when the time comes to act you make a snap judgment I mean I'm speaking a little extremely uh making some fun of it and so on because after all uh we we do occasionally get the vague outlines of things and make a right decision on rational grounds but we fortunately forget the variables that could have interfered with this coming out right it's amazing how often it works but Warriors are people who

think of all the variables beyond their control and what might happen so then when you make a decision and it works out all right I think very little of it has much to do with your conscious intent and control [Music] [Music] foreign [Music]