A Thought from the Professor: Understand the Power of Choice

I recently had the great pleasure of speaking to a group of highly intelligent, driven and smart young graduates about to embark on their career paths. I was invited to share the single most valuable lesson I have learned from the podcast.

My answer: understand the power of choice.

I explained that the one phrase I learned never to use around my Dad was “I can’t be bothered”.

If he ever asked me the question “Why are you watching the telly indoors, why don’t you go outside and play in the sun?” The correct answer wasn’t “I can’t be bothered.” Instead, if I responded with, “I’m having a really, really great time relaxing on the sofa right now and watching this amazing programme,” he would understand.

I had made a choice.

It doesn’t matter what you do, whether you want to watch telly, go to the gym, get drunk, read, sleep, work, write a book.  What does matter is that you actively choose to do whatever you do.  You put energy into whatever you choose.

These are the sorts of people I want to be around, the kind of people who are buzzing, interested, engaged with being alive, and I bet that you do too.

This was the lesson I wanted to share with the graduates I addressed.  Don’t wait for someone else - teachers, bosses, colleagues - to give you a task, find your next role, discover you a job you like.  Just make a choice.

It was Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist and a Holocaust survivor who summed it up best. “Everything can be taken from us but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

Are you happy with the quality of your own choices?

Cheers,

Damian