Options are good. The more thoughtfully you plan and the more diligently you prepare, the more likely you’ll be “lucky” enough to have options. Those options represent choices of direction, potential paths to follow and decision points along your life’s journey.

We may think about options such as what school to attend, what sport to play, what career path to follow and/or where to live. Since we can’t pursue everything and do it well, we narrow down the options to those that represent the best fit and which can provide us with the greatest life value. Options are typically proportional to the investments, of all types, that we’ve made to reach a certain decision point.

Choices, on the other hand, tend to represent individual selections made across many aspects of our lives. Having some choices is good; sorting through too many can be overwhelming. I’ll reveal my generation by saying that I remember having only 3 choices of television channels as a child; yes, the 3 major networks (ABC, CBS & NBC) competed for our attention and they all went “off the air” in the late night hours each day. Now there are several hundred channel choices on cable, plus endless other choices that can be streamed upon demand! In some ways these vast choices represent progress but, in some ways, they’ve created a fog of confusion.

Restaurant and menu choices can be daunting too. A well-designed and thoughtful menu is a joy; an expansive menu containing hundreds of choices can be a bit too much. Where do you start? And what do you choose? Surely they can’t serve everything and maintain quality; can they? And, if you don’t feel like going out, there’s always Uber Eats…..

Daily choices of what to read, watch, write, eat and do become cumulative. And then there is the most important choice of who to associate with, which in turn influences other choices we make. It’s possible to channel surf through life, or to make conscious choices.

I think about creating Options as the main purpose of our daily focus, discipline and actions. By maintaining that perspective, the Choices we make tend to be narrowed down from the infinite and aligned with our goals. Wise choices lead to better options.

Tempus Maximize!