Choices and Consequences David Kingsbury July 14th, 2021

Posted on December 15, 2022 by David Kingsbury, One of Thousands of Leadership Coaches on Noomii.

Editor’s Note: Originally Posted on the website DKKinged.com, where you can find many more articles and sign up for our free e-newsletter.

Behold my struggle.

Such has been my battle since my youth. Back then, the choice was far clearer. Broccoli was the bitter taste of defeat and the imposed nutrition inflicted upon me by my parents. But M&Ms, with their crunchy peanut center and alluring shine were always welcome by the handful…oft accompanied by a cool glass of milk.

Now, I’m a little older and little wiser, I hope. I know enough to discern which is necessary and which is trivial, which will increase my strength and quality of life and which will degrade it. But, cavities be darned, I still want those chocolate treats with the same passion that consumed my 8-year-old self.

Maybe you have a similar struggle?

If not broccoli and M&Ms, perhaps going to the gym and watching Netflix, or clearing your desk and procrastinating, or showing compassion and letting your fury fly. I’m sure there’s something, right?

Choices

Every moment of every day, we make choices. Do I get up or hit the snooze button? Do I wear this shirt or that shirt? Do I hang out with my friends or go to work today? Do I visit my family or mow the lawn? Do I buy this or buy that?

In fact, we constantly make so many choices that we become unaware we are even making them. It is estimated that the average person makes around 35,000 choices every single day.

But it’s not until we are facing something we think is “big” that we say, “Man, I’m really facing a tough choice now.” The reality is, you’re always making a tough choice.

You know what makes it easier? We automate our choices. We fall into routines. We develop habits. We cultivate mindsets and worldviews.

When we do this, the vast majority of our choices become invisible. We don’t even realize we’re making them because, in essence, our brains are just following the script laid out for them.
Here’s a potential scenario to demonstrate the principle:

Someone believes that making money is the most important thing in their life. So they think excessively about finances and watch their checkbook, often to the exclusion of other thoughts. They prioritize activities and events based on whether or not those actions fit their belief and thoughts. They then execute the programming by making choices in line with what they have chosen to believe.

Note that I said, “they have chosen to believe.” What we believe and, consequently, what we think is also a choice. It may be one you make a long time ago, or let someone else make for you, but once it has been made, it stands.

And from it flows your feelings…your actions…your life.

Consequences

And so we choose and we choose and we choose. We build our lives brick by brick out of the decisions we make each day.

We seize opportunities or ignore possibilities. We take a thousand “little” actions that shape the world around us. Every choice we make, invariably, has a consequence attached to it.

If we chose to be kind and generous, we find ourselves surrounded with friends. If we chose to invest in our home life, we see a happy family materialize around us. If we make sound financial choices, we reap the benefit of monetary security. Or the inverse of these things…

Choices have consequences.

Okay, that’s probably the “Captain Obvious” statement of the century. Duh, right? But if this is so blatantly apparent, why then do we make so many dumb choices and face so many horrible outcomes?

Trajectory

The simple reason is trajectory. You see, most choices do not have significant weight on their own, nor do they bring about instant consequences.

So, we go through a day making 35,000 decisions and feel like we’ve accomplished nothing or that the things we did have little impact.

But all these inconsequential choices, when combined with time, amplify themselves and produce a cumulative effect. Do you know how much a ton of feathers weighs? A ton.

Trajectory refers to the angle at which something is traveling. Let’s say you are 10 feet away from a target and you fire your bullet 5 degrees to the right off-center of the bullseye. What will happen is that you’ll still hit the bullseye, but the impact will be nearly imperceptibly to the right just a bit.

No big deal, right?

But let’s move the target back.

Now, we’re 10 yards away. You fire with the same 5 degree offset. Now, you don’t hit the bullseye at all. Your impact is clearly a miss to an outer ring. Your aim didn’t change. Your choice was the same, but distance amplified the result of your skewed trajectory.

Now, let’s move the target back even farther but keep the 5 degree offset. Depending on how far back you move your mark, that very same aim, that very same choice, will miss the target by literally miles.

In our lives, our tiny choices define our trajectory, and they seem quite small up close. But when we evaluate them across distance, which in our case is time, little things become massive.

So, yeah, me eating either a bowl of broccoli or a bowl of M&Ms today is not likely to have any noticeable impact in the moment, or even weeks from now.

But if I kept eating one or the other over the course of years, the consequences become staggering. This is especially true if you have an eternal perspective.

Chew on that for a moment and see if it doesn’t blow your mind. In the movie Gladiator, Maximus says, “What we do in life echoes in eternity.” I believe this is true. Likewise, this admonition is recorded in Deuteronomy 30:19, “…I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life…”

Mind the small things. Every choice you make, every seemingly trivial decision, is building a momentum so powerful that it will shape the very course of your life. Your beliefs, your thoughts, and how you act on them quite literally determine your destiny.

There are no small choices.