Decision making is a crucial feature in our day-to-day life. It comprises of important ones as well as insignificant, unimportant ones. It can vary from what we wear, to the pen we use, to cooking, an outing, etc. Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon one of the founders of the fields of organization theory and information processing has coined a term called ‘satisficing’. It means you are satisfied and sufficient. The idea behind the term is to describe not getting the very best option but one that was good enough. Satisficing is one of the foundations of productive human behavior; it prevails when we don’t waste time on decisions that don’t matter, or more accurately, when we don’t waste time trying to find improvements that are not going to make a significant difference in our happiness or satisfaction.
Our daily life is about making decisions and with every passing generation it is becoming an increasingly daunting task. There is so much distraction in the current lifestyle that it’s not as simple as a ‘yes’ or ‘no’. When someone is communicating with us, there is a need for our minds to process and come up with decisions. Study says, to understand one person speaking to us, we need to process 60 bits of information per second. With a processing limit of 120 bits per second, this means you can barely understand two people talking to you at the same time, leave alone three people.
Best decisions are made in the satisficing stage, i.e. when you are satisfied and sufficient. Recent research in social psychology has shown that happy people are not people who have more; rather, those who are happy with what they have. Happy people engage in satisficing all the time, even if they don’t know it. They exhibit a better mental frame than those who are anxious and struggling. Apostle Paul, the author of one of the books of the Bible states, “I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need.”. The tension of dichotomy in living a satisficing life in an ever-wanting world can be eased only through divine intervention in our lives. Apostle Paul further states, “I count all things as loss compared to the surpassing excellence of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ.”. What and whom you value above all the temporal things matter. Getting to know Jesus Christ will give you the satisfaction and sufficiency that your soul is always longing for. He is the only one who can fill that void, the puzzle piece that your life needs to experience harmony because He created you for a purpose.
Click to read the previous blog HERE
No comments:
Post a Comment