making right choices essay

Essays About Choice: Top 5 Examples and 8 Prompts

Finding it hard to start your essays about choice? Here are our essay examples and prompts to inspire you. 

Making choices, whether big or small, makes up the very journey of our lives. Our choices are influenced by various factors, such as our preferences, beliefs, experiences, and cognitive capacity. Our choices unravel our lives and shape us into the person we choose to be. 

However, humans can easily be distracted and could be irrational when making choices. With this, new studies have emerged to learn more accurately about our thought processes and help us move beyond our limited rationality when making our choices. 

Read on and see our round-up of compelling essay examples and prompts to inspire you in writing your piece about choice.

1. The Art Of Decision-Making by Joshua Rothman

2. tactical generals: leaders, technology, and the perils by peter w. singer, 3. how your emotions influence your decisions by svetlana w. whitener, 4. how to choose the right pet for you by roxanna coldiron, 5. how to make money decisions when the future is uncertain by veronica dagher and julia carpenter, 1. the hardest but best choice in my life, 2. how to make good decisions, 3. “my body, my choice.”, 4. the consequences of bad choices, 5. how consumers make choices, 6. the rise of behavioral economics, 7. moral choices, 8. analyzed the poem “the road not taken.”.

“One of the paradoxes of life is that our big decisions are often less calculated than our small ones are. We agonize over what to stream on Netflix, then let TV shows persuade us to move to New York; buying a new laptop may involve weeks of Internet research, but the deliberations behind a life-changing breakup could consist of a few bottles of wine.”

The article dives deep into the mind’s methods of making choices. It tackles various theories and analyses from various writers and philosophers, such as the decision theory where you make a “multidimensional matrix” in coming up with the most viable choice based on your existing values and the “transformative experience” where today’s values may not determine your tomorrow but makes you fulfilled, nevertheless.

Check out these essays about reading and essays about the contemporary world .

“The challenge is that tactical generals often overestimate how much they really know about what happens on the ground. New technologies may give them an unprecedented view of the battlefield and the ability to reach into it as never before, but this view remains limited.”

Fourth industrial technologies such as artificial intelligence are everywhere and are now penetrating the military system, enabling generals to make more tactical choices. This development allows generals a broader insight into the situation, stripped of the emotional and human interventions that can spoil a rational and sound choice. However, these computer systems remain fraught with challenges and must be dealt with with caution.

“… emotions influence, skew or sometimes completely determine the outcome of a large number of decisions we are confronted with in a day. Therefore, it behooves all of us who want to make the best, most objective decisions to know all we can about emotions and their effect on our decision-making.”

Whitener stresses that external and hormonal factors significantly affect our decisions but determining the role and impact of our emotions helps us make positive decisions. This exercise requires being circumspect in our emotions in a given situation and, of course, not making a decision when under stress or pressure.  Check out these essays about respect .

“Whether we choose to adopt a cat, dog, rabbit, fish, bird, hamster, or guinea pig, knowing that we provide that animal with the best care that it needs is an important aspect of being a pet caretaker. But it’s also about the individual animal.”

Knowing which pet is best for you boils down to carefully evaluating your limits and lifestyle preference. This essay provides a list of questions you should first ask yourself regarding the time and energy you can commit before adopting a pet. It also provides a run-through of pets and their habits that can match your limits and preferences. 

How do I know when is a good time to invest? The article answers this burning financial question and many more amid a period of financial uncertainties propelled by the COVID-19 pandemic. It also provides tips, such as evaluating your short and long-term financial goals and tapping an accountant or financial adviser, to help readers make a confident choice in their finances. 

8 Prompts On essays about choice

Get creative with our list of prompts on choice:

What is now your best choice may have seemed a difficult one at first. So, talk about the situation where you had to make this hard decision. Then, lay down the lessons you have learned from analyzing the pros and cons of a situation and how you are now benefiting from this choice. Your scenarios can range from picking your school or course for college or dropping out some toxic friends or relatives. 

Making the right choice is a life skill, but it’s easier said than done. First, gather recent research studies that shed light on the various factors that affect how we come up with our choices. Then, look into the best practices to make good decisions based on what psychologists, therapists, and other experts recommend. Finally, to add a personal touch to your essay, describe how you make decisions that effectively result in positive outcomes.  

“My Body, My Choice” is a feminist slogan that refers to women’s right to choose what’s best for their bodies. The slogan aimed to resist the traditional practice of fixed marriages and fight for women’s reproductive rights, such as abortion. For this prompt, you may underscore the importance of listening to women when making policies and rules that involve their bodies and health. You may even discuss the controversial Roe v. Wade ruling and provide your insights on this landmark overturn of women’s rights to abortion.

Bad choices in major life decisions can lead to disastrous events. And we’ve all had our fair share of bad choices. So first, analyze why people tend to make bad decisions. Next, write about the common consequences students face when they fall into the trap of bad choices. Then, talk about an experience where your bad judgment led you to an undesirable situation. Finally, write the lessons you’ve learned from this experience and how this improved your life choices. 

How does a shopper’s mind work? Your essay can answer this through the lens of marketers. You can start by mapping out the stages consumers go through when choosing. Then, identify the fundamental principles that help marketers effectively drive more sales—finally, research how marketers are persuading their target audience through their branding imagery and emotional connection.

Behavioral economics combines the teaching of psychology and economics to study how humans arrive at their economic choices. The discipline challenges the fundamental principle in economic models, which assumes that humans make rational choices. First, provide a brief overview of behavioral economics and how it was born and evolved over the decades. Finally, offer insights on how you think behavioral economics can be adopted in private companies and government agencies to improve decision-making. 

First, define a moral choice. Then, enumerate the factors that can shape a moral choice, such as religion, ethics, culture, and gender. You can also zoom into a certain scenario that sparks debates on the morality of choice, such as in warfare when generals decide whether to drop a bomb or when to forge on or withdraw from a battle. Finally, you may also feature people in history who have managed to let their moral code prevail in their judgment and actions, even in the face of great danger.

Making choices and the opportunities one can miss out on are the central themes in this poem by Robert Frost. First, summarize the poem and analyze what the author says about making choices. Then, attempt to answer what the diverging roads represent and what taking the less traveled road signifies. Finally, narrate an event in your life when you made an unpopular choice. Share whether you regret the choice or ended up being satisfied with it.

If you are interested in learning more, check out our essay writing tips .

But if you’re still stuck, there’s no need to fret. Instead, check out our general resource of essay writing topics .

Yna Lim is a communications specialist currently focused on policy advocacy. In her eight years of writing, she has been exposed to a variety of topics, including cryptocurrency, web hosting, agriculture, marketing, intellectual property, data privacy and international trade. A former journalist in one of the top business papers in the Philippines, Yna is currently pursuing her master's degree in economics and business.

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More Than a Feeling: The Keys to Making the Right Choice

If we want to make better decisions, then we need to think more like an artist.

March 20, 2024

Rational, analytical thinking is often seen as the gold standard when it comes to decision-making. Yet according to Professor Baba Shiv, cool, level-headed intellect isn’t the only game in town. “Is a good decision based on reason?” he asks. “Or is it based on emotion?”

Shiv is the Sanwa Bank, Limited, Professor of Marketing at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Throughout his career, he’s researched how brain structures related to emotion and motivation affect the choices we make. In exploring the complex neurology that leads people to choose one course of action over another, he has uncovered insights that challenge our prevailing ideas about reason and rationality. In this episode of If/Then: Business, Leadership, Society , Shiv explores how we can use our emotions and instincts to make meaningful decisions instead of relying on our rational brains alone.

Is Rational Always Right?

Post-Enlightenment Western thought is infused with the assumption that rationality is at the core of properly functioning individuals and, by extension, properly functioning societies. “We have this embedded in our minds from childhood,” Shiv says. “If you’re making consequential decisions, be as rational as possible.” It’s an idea that Shiv traces from Aristotle to Descartes to the present, but one that “forgets that we have evolved with emotion. If emotion were irrelevant, we would have evolved very differently.”

According to Shiv, the rational brain is only responsible for about 5 to 10% of our decision-making. “Emotions… have a profound influence on our decisions and we aren’t aware of it,” he says.

Shiv demonstrated this in a study involving wine drinkers and the neural processes used to distinguish different vintages. Subjects were told that they would be trying five different cabernet sauvignons, each identified by price. In fact, only three wines were used — two were poured twice, and each was marked with a fake price ranging from $5 to $90. As the participants tasted each wine, Shiv monitored their brain activity.

“What intrigued me was that people swore that the more expensive the wine is, the better it tastes,” Shiv says. “And the question I had was: Is this just a figment of our imagination? Or is the brain extracting more pleasure when the wine is more expensive?” That is exactly what his results found: “The area of the brain that codes for pleasure shows greater activation when the brain thinks it is tasting a higher-priced wine than when it’s tasting a lower-priced wine, even though subjects tasted the same wine.”

Making the Decision Right

In addition to helping us make decisions, emotions play a critical role in helping us commit to the choices that we make. To move forward with a decision, we need what Shiv calls “decision confidence,” the conviction that our choice is the correct one.

“If you emerge from the decision with doubts, you’re more likely to give up too early and not persist in the course of action that you adopted,” he says. “You need to emerge from the decision feeling absolutely confident. It’s not making the ‘right decision’ but making the decision right.”

Much of society, especially business, places a premium on rational thinking, but Shiv encourages us to embrace our instincts and intuitions. As this episode of If/Then explores, if we want to make better decisions, then we need to think more like an artist.

Senior Editor, Stanford GSB

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If/Then is a podcast from Stanford Graduate School of Business that examines research findings that can help us navigate the complex issues we face in business, leadership, and society. Each episode features an interview with a Stanford GSB faculty member.

Full Transcript

Note: Transcripts are generated by machine and lightly edited by humans. They may contain errors.

Kevin Cool: If we want to make better decisions, then we need to think more like an artist.

Yunfei Ren: I don’t think we should look at artists as a different species. We all have a bit of the artist genes in ourselves.

Kevin Cool: Yunfei Ren is a visual artist from Wuhan, China. He’s speaking at the launch of a photo series at a theater space in San Francisco. Yunfei has exhibited at museums like the de Young and Cantor Arts Center at Stanford, but he only recently started calling himself an artist.

Yunfei Ren: I started thinking of myself as an artist since the pandemic, actually. That was a major change. I had a whole corporate career for about 10 years in marketing. And when I turned 30, I decided to give photography a shot.

Kevin Cool: He quit his job and started pursuing an MFA. But the biggest change was in his outlook.

Yunfei Ren: When you’re an artist, you start to ask yourself from within what are the questions I want to answer, what are the things that I want to respond to, and then you create artwork for them. And it’s an attitude shift; it’s a mindset shift.

Kevin Cool: He often thinks analytically, weighing the pros and cons before he makes a decision, but he says he has been trying to approach his personal life more like he approaches his art.

Yunfei Ren: Becoming an artist has been quite freeing for me. I’ve learned to just trust my instinct more and be okay with however it turns out.

Kevin Cool: And he doesn’t think this perspective is just for people pursuing a life like his. Anyone can do it, even if they’re not making art.

Yunfei Ren: I think ultimately thinking like an artist is really thinking like people, like human beings, to trust your own instincts and start from the heart: what do you like, what do you believe in. And the data and external materials can help, but it’s a balance between the two, I think.

Kevin Cool: We rely on analytical thinking and data for so much of our life, but what would happen if we approached the world the way an artist does? Could we use our emotions, our instincts, to make meaningful decisions instead of relying on our rational brains alone?

This is If/Then , a podcast from Stanford Graduate School of Business, where we examine research findings that could help us navigate the complex issues facing us in business, leadership, and society. I’m Kevin Cool, Senior Editor at the GSB. Today we speak with Baba Shiv, the Sanwa Bank, Limited, Professor of Marketing. According to Baba, if we want to make better decisions, then we need to think more like an artist.

So, let’s start with a fact that I think drives much of your research. The rational part of the brain accounts for about 5 to 10 percent of the decisions we make.

Baba Shiv: That’s right.

Kevin Cool: In what ways then do emotions drive our decision making?

Baba Shiv: Profound influence on our decisions. And it’s all nonconscious. We’re not aware that these emotions — what I call more broadly speaking this instinctual brain/body systems that we share with other animal species — have a profound influence on our decisions, and we aren’t aware of it.

Kevin Cool: Do most people know that?

Baba Shiv: A great question. Most people intuitively know that. I mean, for example, we might think that we’re being rational. But at the end of the day, what the rational brain is good at very often is not at being rational. What the rational brain is good at is at simply rationalizing what the emotional brain has already decided to do. It constructs all these narratives, all these stories, in support of what the emotional brain has already decided to do and we are unaware of.

Kevin Cool: Convincing ourselves.

Baba Shiv: Convincing ourselves.

Kevin Cool: Right.

Baba Shiv: So, it is almost that I think people intuitively know that from their life experiences is that they’ve been taught to do something different, and therein lies the conflict. And my goal is to tell people that, no, rely on your intuition out there, rely on your gut. It’s telling you something very useful going forward.

Kevin Cool: When is emotion a good thing when we’re making a decision and when is it a bad thing?

Baba Shiv: That is the right question to ask because it’s not about whether emotion is good or bad for decision making. You come to the conclusion it’s kind of almost a professorial answer, and that is that it depends. It depends on what will be the next question. It depends on if you want to get rid of biases. Most of the biases in decision making are rooted in emotion. So, if the goal of decision making, of the decision maker, is to make decisions where they’re not falling prey to biases, you want to keep emotion out of the picture, and you want to bring an aspect of reason into the decision making as possible.

But there’s a second goal of decision making, and that is you need to emerge from the decision feeling absolutely confident about the decision and the course of action you’/re adopting. Because if you emerge from the decision with doubts, that’ll give rise to downstream effects in the sense that if you face a roadblock, which is bound to happen after you make a decision because it’s never a straight path from A to B; there are going to be some bumps along the way. If there are going to be bumps along the way and you’re not confident about the decision, you’re more likely to give up too early and not persist in the course of action that you’ve adopted.

Kevin Cool: So, if science says that the rational part of our brain has such a small influence and emotion plays this large, why does it seem like we act as if we can make rational decisions, “Just give me the facts and I’ll make a good decision”?

Baba Shiv: Yeah. I mean, that’s, I think, coming from the traditional viewpoint that has come down the ages. When you go back to Plato, go back to Aristotle, go back to Descartes, the fundamental premise at that point in time and came down the ages was what I call the traditionalist view of decision making, was that emotion is like the wild horse that needs to be reined in, right? Because emotion, as I mentioned before, will give rise to a whole host of biases.

And as decision makers making very consequential decisions — making an investment decision, an acquisition decision, making a very senior hire, et cetera — we really don’t want to fall prey to biases. That is the way that the traditionalists have viewed this, which tells us that in order to make these consequential decisions, we need to, number one, deliberate on the decision: think about the pros and cons, what are the costs, what are the benefits, what are the value you’re going to get from a course of action, what is the probability.

So, these are all reason, the scientist way of thinking about a decision. And that is the reason why I think we have this embedded in our minds right from childhood that if you’re making these consequential decisions, be as rational as possible. But what we forget to understand is that we have evolved with emotion, and there has to be a reason for that. If emotion were irrelevant, we would’ve evolved very differently.

And the conclusion that we have come to from a lot of science that has come out since, I would say, the 1980s — and the major proponent of that was Antonio Demasio who was at the University of Iowa when I was there. He and his wife and his team have amassed a lot of evidence that without emotion, we’ll simply be unable to make decisions in the sense that we’ll make a decision, but if we have to stick to the decision, stick to the course of action that we have adopted and persist on that course of action, without emotion we’ll be unable to do that. In other words, the root of what we call decision confidence, the confidence and the conviction that you emerge from the decision, is fundamentally rooted in emotion.

Kevin Cool: And we do live in an age in which data rules in lots of situations and we have much more capability. And now, of course, artificial intelligence is enhancing that capability even more. But there does seem to be a growing understanding of the importance of storytelling, which is something that you talk about. How does that allow us to influence others who are making decisions?

Baba Shiv: Part of the way we think, the way we think could be one of them is going to be — the reflective side of the brain is about the reasoning side. I mean, humans are endowed with being able to reason: get the data, evaluate the pros and cons and so on. But there is another side of the brain, and we’ve evolved for that, and that is the way humans make sense of the world around us — not just the present but the past and projecting into the future — is in the form of stories. We construct narratives.

If you have an existing job and you have a new job offer, one of the fundamental ways by which we think about that new offer is in terms of constructing a narrative for ourselves where we are the protagonist in that story. And we’re asking ourselves, okay, going though that narrative, what are the emotions that are emerging from the story, because stories are infused with emotion. Whereas if you adopt the more logical side, you’re keeping emotion out of the picture.

And therefore, in a stage of the decision-making process where you don’t want to fall prey to biases, you don’t want to engage in storytelling, right? You have to make sure that all the data have been considered. But once you have all the data — And there’s only so much that you can do. You don’t want to fall prey to data paralysis or analysis paralysis because you can only get so much of data.

I’ll often hear people saying that “We are a data driven organization.” I’ll say, “Yeah, that’s why you’re slow at making decisions, because you make the decision and move on.” But when you have to move on, that logic has to be kept aside, and now you have to construct the story and say, okay, I have two courses of action. One, I can stick to the current job, which is going to construct a narrative for me, the team, my family, et cetera.

There’s going to be another option out there; I’m going to construct another narrative out there. Which of these two narratives are resonating with me at a gut level? And that’s what I would go with because the emotion is telling me that that’s the direction I want to go. And if I make the decision in that — if I adopt that course of action, I’m bound to be more confident about the course of action adopted.

Kevin Cool: You’re listening to If/Then , a podcast from Stanford Graduate School of Business. We’ll continue our conversation after the break.

Baba, you’ve said you think we as a society should be more artistic than we are scientific. Well, you’re a scientist — not an artist — so what makes you say that?

Baba Shiv: Okay, let me take a step back and answer the following way. I’m not saying one is good, one is bad. I’m saying that leaders need to develop skills of not just being scientists. And most leaders today are trained as being scientists making very reasoned decisions out there. What we need to have is a good balance of the scientific mind and the artistic mind because artists dream, and dreams are what inspire us.

Kevin Cool: A lot of your work has been about the placebo effect, which we usually think of in terms of medicine. Does the placebo effect extend to business decisions where the belief that something is going to happen positively is more important than the objective information we have that might suggest it wouldn’t?

Baba Shiv: So, here’s the way to think about it. In the real world, there are no successes or failures. Just think about it. You make a decision, there’s only an outcome. You’re just a brain that has to interpret that outcome as a success or a failure.

Kevin Cool: I see.

Baba Shiv: And any outcome is going to be in the form of a distribution. There are going to be some positives; there are going to be some negatives.

Now if you are confident about the course of action you’re taking. You have visualized the whole thing. You believe with true conviction that, yes, there are going to be stumbling blocks along the way, of course it’s going to happen, that’s reality, but I am going to reach an endpoint I’ll be happy with. If you have that conviction out there, and there’s an outcome which has got both positives and negatives, which side of the distribution are you going to sample from? Naturally, the brain is going to sample from the positive end of the distribution, and therefore it is going to become a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Take another leader who is in doubt after having made the decision. It’s the same outcome that has happened, again with the same distribution of positives and negatives. But that person who’s in doubt is more likely to sample from the negative end of the distribution. And therefore, that will again become a self-fulfilling prophesy because the data coming in suggests that this is not the course of action I need to adopt because I sampled from the negative end, and therefore I’m more likely to give up sooner. But if I just persisted for some more time, it would’ve become the right course of action to go. That’s the way to think about the placebo effect.

Kevin Cool: And this isn’t just a theory, right?

Baba Shiv: Right.

Kevin Cool: You did a study to prove this with wine tasting. So, tell us about that study.

Baba Shiv: So, here’s a study that we did. When I came from Iowa — I was at the University of Iowa, and I came to Stanford in 2005 — one thing that struck me was how many oenophiles out here. I mean, people love wine out here, and I came from a culture that wine was not part of the conversation.

And so, what intrigued me was that I would visit all these wineries, and what intrigued me was that people swore that the more expensive the wine is, the better it tastes. And the question I had was is this just a figment of our imagination or is it truly that the brain is extracting more pleasure when the wine is more expensive than the wine is less expensive, right?

So, here’s a study that we did where imagine you’re a test subject. You come into the lab and you’re told that you’ll be tasting 5 different California cabernet sauvignons. I’m not going to tell you the brand names. All I’m going to tell you is that the market prices of these wines arrange from $5 to $90. Okay, you’re going to taste these 5 different wines. And as you’re tasting these wines, I’m going to monitor your whole brain activation.

Imagine that the first wine that shows up on the screen is a $90 wine. Now you look at that piece of information. Wine is squirted into your mouth. We get you to swirl the wine in the mouth for about 4 to 5 seconds. You swallow the wine. And then you rinse it out. Next will be $45. It’s going to be squirted into your mouth, and so on and so forth. Large number of tries. It’s all happening in real time. And what we do is we conduct what is called a test of contrast. And there’s only one factor that changes across the trials, and that is the price. Because unbeknownst to you, you’re tasting the same wine.

And the question we’re asking here is that will the brain extract more pleasure from the wine if it thinks that it’s tasting — if it expects to taste a higher priced wine. And that’s exactly what we find, that indeed that the area of the brain that codes for pleasure in real time shows greater activation when the brain thinks it is tasting a higher priced wine that is tasting a lower priced wine, even though you’re tasting the same wine. And that’s where what you expect, you manifest.

Baba Shiv: And that’s why I said that I have no successes or failures in life. There are only outcomes. It is the brain that has to interpret that outcome as a success or failure. And that’s what is being shown in this wine study as well.

Kevin Cool: And leaders who have that sort of deep conviction and belief in outcome, we’ve seen examples where it has gotten them in trouble.

Baba Shiv: Absolutely.

Kevin Cool: Let’s take an example of Sam Bankman-Fried, right?

Kevin Cool: Where he had certainly a conviction that he had sort of an idea of where he wanted to take this company, and yet somehow wasn’t able to see through the hubris or the mistakes or even the illegalities of what was going on there. So, how do we put a governor on conviction so that it doesn’t lead to hubris?

Baba Shiv: This is a great question, Kevin. It’s a classic phenomenon of bias in the decision-making literature called the escalation of commitment bias. It says that you’ve made a decision, and the information that is coming in about the outcomes seems to suggest that you need to revisit the decision; there’s something going wrong.

But if you are totally delusional and totally convinced that it’s a course of action, you start throwing good resources, good money, after what is turning out to be a bad decision. So, you don’t want to fall prey to those biases. So, you don’t want delusion to carry you away. And unfortunately — or fortunately — it is the delusional mindset that is going to give rise to conviction.

So, what you need to do is from time to time you need to keep yourself in check. So, what I tell leaders to do is that maybe every quarter, maybe every year, what you do is to conduct a premortem in the sense that you are delusional about future success. That’s what is giving rise to the conviction. That is what is causing you to ignore the information coming in seems to suggest that you need to revisit the decision.

What I say is that from time to time, you again become an artist. But this time instead of thinking about all the positives, think about all the negatives. How will this decision end up being the worst decision I ended up making? So, it allows the brain now to have a balanced view of the future — the future isn’t certain — instead of simply sampling from the positive end which is what, when you’re delusional, you do.

Rather than just focusing on the positives, from time to time force yourself to focus on the negatives so that the brain has both pieces of information out there and is wiser going forward knowing that there are negatives that I need to take care of so that the negatives will fade away and the positives will [emerge] into the future. That’s the way to think about it.

Kevin Cool: That would seem to also argue about having some diversity of points of view, values, and so on, on an executive team.

Baba Shiv: Absolutely. So, think about the following. For me, the bigger thing is not about leaders. It’s not about the delusion that leaders go through. My thing is the opposite problem, and that is leaders have a habit. Today, when I look at leaders out there, they have a habit of saying it cannot be done. “It cannot be done. It cannot be done.” We impose constraints on ourselves. For no rhyme or reason, we compose these constraints. And these constraints are inevitable because as we gain experience, experience is a double-edged sword, Kevin, right?

On one hand, experience allows the leader to make decisions out of their gut. Pattern recognition emerges and they’re able to recognize patterns and make these decisions. But the problem with experience is that you’re also going to experience certain successes along the way, you’re going to experience failures along the way. Fortunately, or unfortunately, because of the notion of loss aversion, the failures are going to loom larger than the successes over a period of time. And therefore, naturally a leader is going to become more conservative as the time goes by. So, you want to have a team of people with diversity.

And I’m not talking about diversity in terms of skin color — that’s also important — but I’m talking about diversity in terms of backgrounds, knowledge, et cetera. I would say, you know what, I have a lot of leaders who will hire summer interns, 20-year-olds. And what kind of tasks do they give them? Well, metaphorically, make the copies or get me some coffee. I mean, those are the kind of the trivial things that they’re asked to do.

Kevin Cool: Grunt work.

Baba Shiv: Grunt work. Rather than that, they have no idea of constraints. You have as a leader, but they have no idea of constraints. You give them a task that is almost impossible to solve. Who knows? They might come up with a solution. All you need is one good idea to take forward. That’s why I say, that’s why diversity is so very crucial. And part of diversity, let’s not forget, is age diversity.

Kevin Cool: So, Baba, why do you study decision making? What led you to this area of research?

Baba Shiv: I am the most irrational of decision makers out there. Most academics would say that you study your weaknesses, and one of my weaknesses is I’m very irrational as a decision maker in the sense that the rational thing to do is when you’re making these very consequential decisions, you spend a lot of time deliberating on the decision: evaluate the pros and cons, talk to people, seek opinions, and make up your mind.

Most of my consequential decisions — who I’m going to marry, for example — took me about 30 minutes to decide. My career path was going along, becoming the CEO of a multinational company. And then one of my favorite professors in my MBA program, he asked me a question, “Have you ever thought of becoming a professor?” And I said, “No, sir.” He said, “You should.” And then four-and-a-half months later, he died in an air crash. And I go to his memorial and I ask people, “Hey, did he ever ask you to be a professor?” No one said yes. And I said maybe he saw something in me.

That decision to quit my career path to becoming the CEO of a multinational company — and I was going down that path and I knew I could be successful there — to completely abandon that and adopt a completely new course of action. I mean, what’s going to happen? I didn’t even know what a [PC] was; that took me a couple of days.

So, I’m one of the most irrational of decision makers. And that’s what got me to asking this fundamental question, and that is, is a good decision really based on reason or is it based on emotion? And that’s been the hallmark of a lot of the work I do, asking these fundamental questions where people have certain assumptions about human behavior, what is the appropriate thing to do. And I question them and I say, “Why not the opposite?”

Kevin Cool: If/Then is produced by Jesse Baker and Eric Nuzum of Magnificent Noise for Stanford Graduate School of Business. Our show is produced by Jim Colgan and Julia Natt. Mixing and sound design by Kristin Mueller. From Stanford GSB, Jenny Luna, Sorel Husbands Denholtz and Elizabeth Wyleczuk-Stern.

If you enjoyed this conversation, we’d appreciate you sharing this with others who might be interested and hope you’ll try some of the other episodes in this series. For more on our professors and their research, or to discover more podcasts coming out of Stanford GSB, visit our website at gsb.stanford.edu. Find more on our YouTube channel. You can follow us on social media at StanfordGSB. I’m Kevin Cool.

For media inquiries, visit the Newsroom .

Explore More

Power, culture, persuasion, and the self: communication insights from stanford gsb faculty, when words aren’t enough: how to excel at nonverbal communication, navigating the nuance: the art of disagreeing without conflict, editor’s picks.

November 20, 2020 Feelings First: How Emotion Shapes Our Communication, Decisions, and Experiences In this episode, we discuss how recognizing your audience’s emotional needs can help you achieve your communication goals.

February 07, 2024 You’re in Charge: How to Use AI as a Powerful Decision-Making Tool If we focus on the jobs rather than the emotions, then AI can be a powerful decision-making tool.

July 26, 2021 Class Takeaways — The Frinky Science of the Human Mind Five lessons in five minutes: Professor Baba Shiv shows how to build emotional connections that back up your decisions.

March 01, 2011 Baba Shiv: Why Failure Drives Innovation Research says how people approach failure can be key to their success.

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Decision-Making

The importance of learning how to make decisions, the basics of mastering an essential life skill..

Posted May 30, 2015 | Reviewed by Jessica Schrader

Making choices and decisions is a part of life. Simply put, the way life unfolds—with its twists and turns, starts and stops—requires us to make choices and decisions every step of the way. So, I find it fascinating and somewhat baffling that by the time young people have reached adulthood, many have not mastered the art of decision-making . In fact, many people dread change because this means they will have to contemplate something different from what they’re used to and maybe even be required to make change.

Why is this so? Well, there may be many reasons, many factors that determine why some people can just dive into life and do what is required with enthusiasm and excitement while others are paralyzed at the thought of having to step up to anything that might require taking action. A person’s temperament, disposition or nature may contribute to the way they view life. Some people are fearless, enjoying risk and adventure, while others are fearful of making change and making mistakes, preferring to stay close to what is familiar and not wandering too far—and that includes their choices and decisions.

Some people have been burned in the past by poor choices and decisions and are afraid to, once again, risk making a bad choice or decision. So they may do nothing hoping the change will work itself out, or go away, or that somebody else will take care of what needs to be done.

Then there’s the issue of children never learning to make decisions because they’ve never been taught how to do it; many of the important choices have been made for them and they may simply have no say in the matter. That may be the fault of parents who try to control too much of their children’s lives fearing that they will miss out on what they, the parents, deem to be important unless they, the parents, jump in to ensure the “proper” course for their children.

The bottom line is that decision-making is something we all need to learn how to do. This very essential life skill should be taught from very early on since decision-making takes years of practice to master. Learning how to make good choices and wise decisions depends upon several factors: a person’s developmental stage/age, having a general idea of right and wrong (and I mean this in the broadest moral sense since individual’s may acquire their own idea of what is right and wrong for them personally as they mature), understanding what the decision-making process entails, and practice !

You may think starting with infants is just too young but that’s not the case.

It’s good practice to reinforce behavior that is unacceptable or potentially harmful. For example, when a baby begins to crawl, finds small objects or dirt on the floor and mouths it, it’s appropriate not only to remove the object but to say "no” and tell the baby why putting this object in their mouth isn’t OK. Even though a baby may not initially understand what you’re saying, by hearing it over and over again they’ll start to make the connection and understand that all behaviors have consequences—some good, some bad.

Toddlers need to be given controlled options. For example, offer the child a choice between two things only. “Do you want cereal or eggs; milk or juice?” “Do you want to wear the green shirt with these blue pants or this dress with leggings?” This allows the youngster to have a voice in making choices that fit into your choices and routine.

Offer choices/options that are reasonable and readily available to young children.

• Tasks should not be out of their range developmentally. For example, create small jobs that allow your youngster to work beside you, such as dusting the furniture, adding an ingredient or two to a recipe, choosing food at the supermarket, etc.
• When the child moves into the stage of “I can do it myself,” let them try, with your observation and supervision.
• Foster responsibility by allowing the child to do some chores/jobs on their own; for example picking up their toys, feeding the family pet, etc.
• Break down tasks into smaller pieces or steps, showing children that there is an order to how things are accomplished.
• Encourage, especially when a child is frustrated or loses patience.
• Offer praise; get excited for a job well-done, especially when it is the accomplishment of a brand new skill such as dressing themselves, riding a bike, or staying dry through the night.
• For pre-schoolers, expand the number of choices. As a child gets older, their capacity to understand the nuanced difference between right and wrong increases as well as their ability to understand the consequences of their behavior.
• Frame choices using key words that are simple to understand, such as “Do you think this is a good idea/decision/choice, or maybe not the best?’’ Do you have a better idea, or want to make a different decision/choice?’
• Ask questions to help the child understand various possibilities: “What do you think will happen if you decide to do ____?” “How will you feel if you do ____?” If doing something involves someone else, such as a friend or a sib, you can ask the child, “How do you think they will feel as a result of a choice you make?”
• Include your child’s ideas or opinions when it comes to making family decisions. The child will feel heard, their opinion will be appreciated, and their confidence to express themselves will be nurtured. They will also begin to understand that there is a process involved in decision-making.

For school-age children, expand the choices you give them and the importance of the decisions they choose to make. This includes their activities, their friends, school curriculum and educational obligation, and personal choices such as when to go to sleep, style of clothing to buy, pursuit of personal interests such as music, movies, books, and pursuit of special talents and creative abilities such as sports and art. Of course, you as the adult may still make a lot of the important decisions regarding children, but it’s essential to give them the chance to learn for themselves.

Teach the decision-making process.

• Define the issue. Include the need/reason for the decision.
• Brainstorm for possible options and/or solutions.
• Discuss the options, and their potential consequences, and then narrow down to no more than three choices.
• Pick one of the three choices, formulate an action plan, and follow through.
• Evaluate the solution. If the solution is satisfactory, your child will have a sense of accomplishment. If not satisfactory, or it falls short of expectation, or is just a bad idea, reconsider other choices/possibilities that may bring a better outcome.

Be available to your child to talk about issues or problems arising from a decision, and to encourage and lend support, especially in light of a poor decision. Making some bad decisions is part of the maturation process.

Teens and young adults should be encouraged to expand their choices and decisions. Recognize that adolescents want to have more control over their lives. They want more independence, more time with friends, and more fun. Encourage your young adult to independently practice decision-making skills whenever possible, with you watching on the sideline. When you single-handedly continue to make choices and decisions important to your child, you undermine his/her self-esteem and confidence.

No one is expected to get things right all of the time. We often don’t. But, having some idea of what to do will help to make the big choices and decisions easier. Good decision-making is one of the most important life skills to own.

Abigail Brenner, M.D . , is a psychiatrist in private practice. She is the author of Transitions: How Women Embrace Change and Celebrate Life and other books.

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At any moment, someone’s aggravating behavior or our own bad luck can set us off on an emotional spiral that threatens to derail our entire day. Here’s how we can face our triggers with less reactivity so that we can get on with our lives.

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The Art of Decision-Making

By Joshua Rothman

In July of 1838, Charles Darwin was twenty-nine years old and single. Two years earlier, he had returned from his voyage aboard H.M.S. Beagle with the observations that would eventually form the basis of “ On the Origin of Species .” In the meantime, he faced a more pressing analytical problem. Darwin was considering proposing to his cousin Emma Wedgwood, but he worried that marriage and children might impede his scientific career. To figure out what to do, he made two lists. “Loss of time,” he wrote on the first. “Perhaps quarreling. . . . Cannot read in the evenings. . . . Anxiety and responsibility. Perhaps my wife won’t like London; then the sentence is banishment and degradation into indolent, idle fool.” On the second, he wrote, “Children (if it Please God). Constant companion (and friend in old age). . . . Home, & someone to take care of house.” He noted that it was “intolerable to think of spending one’s whole life, like a neuter bee, working, working. . . . Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire and books and music perhaps.”

Beneath his lists, Darwin scrawled, “Marry, Marry, Marry QED.” And yet, Steven Johnson writes, in “Farsighted: How We Make the Decisions That Matter the Most,” “we have no evidence of how he actually weighed these competing arguments against each other.” Johnson, the author of “ How We Got to Now ” and other popular works of intellectual history, can’t help but notice the mediocrity of Darwin’s decision-making process. He points out that Benjamin Franklin used a more advanced pro-and-con technique: in what Franklin called “Prudential Algebra,” a numerical weight is assigned to each listed item, and counterbalancing items are then eliminated. (“If I find a Reason pro equal to some two Reasons con, I strike out the three . . . and thus proceeding I find at length where the Ballance lies,” Franklin explained to a friend.) Even this approach, Johnson writes, is slapdash and dependent upon intuition. “The craft of making farsighted choices—decisions that require long periods of deliberation, decisions whose consequences might last for years,” he concludes, “is a strangely under-appreciated skill.”

We say that we “decide” to get married, to have children, to live in particular cities or embark on particular careers, and in a sense this is true. But how do we actually make those choices? One of the paradoxes of life is that our big decisions are often less calculated than our small ones are. We agonize over what to stream on Netflix, then let TV shows persuade us to move to New York; buying a new laptop may involve weeks of Internet research, but the deliberations behind a life-changing breakup could consist of a few bottles of wine. We’re hardly more advanced than the ancient Persians, who, Herodotus says, made big decisions by discussing them twice: once while drunk, once while sober.

Johnson hopes to reform us. He examines a number of complex decisions with far-reaching consequences—such as the choice, made by President Barack Obama and his advisers, to green-light the raid on Osama bin Laden’s presumed compound, in Abbottabad, Pakistan—and then shows how the people in charge drew upon insights from “decision science,” a research field at the intersection of behavioral economics, psychology, and management. He thinks that we should apply such techniques to our own lives.

I’ve never had to decide whether to launch a covert raid on a suspected terrorist compound, but I’ve made my share of big decisions. This past summer, my wife and I had a baby boy. His existence suggests that, at some point, I decided to become a father. Did I, though? I never practiced any prudential algebra; rather than drawing up lists of pros and cons and concluding, on balance, that having kids was a good idea, I gradually and unintentionally transitioned from not particularly wanting children to wanting them, and from wanting them to joining my wife in having them. If I made a decision, it wasn’t a very decisive one. In “ War and Peace ,” Tolstoy writes that, while an armchair general may imagine himself “analyzing some campaign on a map” and then issuing orders, a real general never finds himself at “the beginning of some event”; instead, he is perpetually situated in the middle of a series of events, each a link in an endless chain of causation. “Can it be that I allowed Napoleon to get as far as Moscow?” Tolstoy’s General Kutuzov wonders. “When was it decided? Was it yesterday, when I sent Platov the order to retreat, or was it the evening before, when I dozed off and told Bennigsen to give the orders? Or still earlier?” Unlike the capture of Moscow by Napoleon, the birth of my son was a joyous occasion. Still, like Kutuzov, I’m at a loss to explain it: it’s a momentous choice, but I can’t pinpoint the making of it in space or time.

For Tolstoy, the tendency of big decisions to make themselves was one of the great mysteries of existence. It suggested that the stories we tell about our lives are inadequate to their real complexity. Johnson means to offer a way out of the Tolstoyan conundrum. He wants to make us writers, rather than readers, of our own stories. Doing so requires engaging with one of life’s fundamental questions: Are we in charge of the ways we change?

Ideally, we’d be omniscient and clearheaded. In reality, we make decisions in imperfect conditions that prevent us from thinking things through. This, Johnson explains, is the problem of “bounded rationality.” Choices are constrained by earlier choices; facts go undiscovered, ignored, or misunderstood; decision-makers are compromised by groupthink and by their own fallible minds. The most complex decisions harbor “conflicting objectives” and “undiscovered options,” requiring us to predict future possibilities that can be grasped, confusingly, only at “varied levels of uncertainty.” (The likelihood of marital quarrelling must somehow be compared with that of producing a scientific masterwork.) And life’s truly consequential choices, Johnson says, “can’t be understood on a single scale.” Suppose you’re offered two jobs: one at Partners in Health, which brings medical care to the world’s neediest people, and the other at Goldman Sachs. You must consider which option would be most appealing today, later this year, and decades from now; which would be preferable emotionally, financially, and morally; and which is better for you, your family, and society. From this multidimensional matrix, a decision must emerge.

Professional deciders, Johnson reports, use decision processes to navigate this complexity. Many of the best processes unfold in stages—a divergence stage might precede a convergence stage—and are undertaken by groups. (Darwin might have divided his friends into two opposing teams, in the divergence stage, and then held a debate between them.) The decision might be turned into an iterative adventure. In a series of meetings known as a “design charrette”—the concept is borrowed from the field of product design—a large problem is divided into subproblems, each of which is assigned to a group; the groups then present their work to the whole team, receive feedback, regroup, and revise, in a cycle that loops until a decision has been made. (For architects in nineteenth-century Paris, working en charrette meant revising until the very last minute, even in the cart on the way to deliver a design to a panel of judges.) Charrettes are useful not just because they break up the work but because they force groups with different priorities and sensibilities—coders and designers, architects and real-estate developers—to interact, broadening the range of available viewpoints.

At firms like Royal Dutch Shell, where growth requires investing in expensive ventures, such as ports, wells, and pipelines, deciders use “scenario planning” to imagine how such investments might play out. (A scenario-planning starter kit, Johnson writes, contains three possible futures: “You build one model where things get better, one where they get worse, and one where they get weird.”) Military planners use immersive war games, carried out in the field or around a table, to bring more of the “decision map” into view. In such games, our enemies discover possibilities that we can’t foresee, ameliorating the poverty of our individual imaginations. And since the games can be played over and over, they allow decision-makers to “rewind the tape,” exploring many branches of the “decision tree.”

It would be strange to stage a war game about a prospective marriage. Still, Johnson writes, decision science has lessons for us as individuals. Late in “Farsighted,” he recounts his own use of decision-scientific strategies to persuade his wife to move, with their two children, from New York City to the Bay Area. Johnson starts with intuitions—redwoods are beautiful; the tech scene is cool—but quickly moves beyond them. He conducts a “full-spectrum analysis,” arriving at various conclusions about what moving might mean financially, psychologically (will moving to a new city make him feel younger?), and existentially (will he want to have been “the kind of person who lived in one place for most of his adult life”?). Johnson summarizes his findings in a PowerPoint deck, then shows it to his wife, who raises objections that he hasn’t foreseen (all her friends live in Brooklyn). Eventually, they make a contract. They’ll move, but if after two years she wants to return to New York they’ll do so, “no questions asked”—a rewind.

Seven years later, they’re happy with a bicoastal existence. Would Johnson have benefitted from “conducting a multidisciplinary charrette” to explore his family’s move? Probably not. Still, he writes, the principles of decision science—“seeking out diverse perspectives on the choice, challenging your assumptions, making an explicit effort to map the variables”—constituted “a step up” from the pro-and-con lists that Franklin and Darwin would have made. Looking back on his decision, Johnson can at least feel confident that he made one.

Johnson’s book is part of a long tradition. For centuries, philosophers have tried to understand how we make decisions and, by extension, what makes any given decision sound or unsound, rational or irrational. “Decision theory,” the destination on which they’ve converged, has tended to hold that sound decisions flow from values. Faced with a choice—should we major in economics or in art history?—we first ask ourselves what we value, then seek to maximize that value.

From this perspective, a decision is essentially a value-maximizing equation. If you’re going out and can’t decide whether to take an umbrella, you could come to a decision by following a formula that assigns weights to the probability of rain, the pleasure you’ll feel in strolling unencumbered, and the displeasure you’ll feel if you get wet. Most decisions are more complex than this, but the promise of decision theory is that there’s a formula for everything, from launching a raid in Abbottabad to digging an oil well in the North Sea. Plug in your values, and the right choice pops out.

In recent decades, some philosophers have grown dissatisfied with decision theory. They point out that it becomes less useful when we’re unsure what we care about, or when we anticipate that what we care about might shift. In a 2006 article called “ Big Decisions: Opting, Converting, Drifting ,” the late Israeli philosopher Edna Ullmann-Margalit asked us to imagine being one of “the early socialist Zionist pioneers” who, at the turn of the twentieth century, dreamed of moving from Europe to Palestine and becoming “the New Jews of their ideals.” Such a change, she observed, “alters one’s life project and inner core”; one might speak of an “Old Person” who existed beforehand, browsing bookshops in Budapest, and a “New Person” who exists afterward, working a field in the desert. The point of such a move isn’t to maximize one’s values. It’s to reconfigure them, rewriting the equations by which one is currently living one’s life.

Ullmann-Margalit doubted that such transformative choices could be evaluated as sound or unsound, rational or irrational. She tells the story of a man who “hesitated to have children because he did not want to become the ‘boring type’ ” that parents tend to become. “Finally, he did decide to have a child and, with time, he did adopt the boring characteristics of his parent friends—but he was happy!” Whose values were maximized—Old Person’s or New Person’s? Because no value-maximizing formula could capture such a choice, Ullmann-Margalit suggested that, rather than describing this man as having “decided” to have children, we say that he “opted” to have them—“opting” (in her usage) being what we do when we shift our values instead of maximizing them.

The nature of “opting situations,” she thought, explains why people “are in fact more casual and cavalier in the way they handle their big decisions than in the way they handle their ordinary decisions.” Yet it’s our unexplored options that haunt us. A decision-maker who buys a Subaru doesn’t dwell on the Toyota that might have been: the Toyota doesn’t represent a version of herself with different values. An opter, however, broods over “the person one did not marry, the country one did not emigrate to, the career one did not pursue,” seeing, in the “shadow presence” implied by the rejected option, “a yardstick” by which she might evaluate “the worth, success or meaning” of her actual life.

One might hope that a little research could bridge the divide between Old Person and New Person. In a 2013 paper titled “ What You Can’t Expect When You’re Expecting ,” L. A. Paul, a philosopher at Yale, writes, “Perhaps you think that you can know what it’s like to have a child, even though you’ve never had one, because you can read or listen to the testimony of what it was like for others. You are wrong.” Paul cites the philosopher David Lewis, who proposed what might be called the Vegemite Principle: if you’ve never tasted Vegemite, a mysterious and beloved Australian “food spread” made from brewer’s yeast, then neither a description of what it’s like (black, gooey, vegetal) nor experience with other spreads (peanut butter, marmalade, Nutella) will suffice to tell you whether you’d like it. Similarly, Paul argues, “being around other people’s children isn’t enough to learn about what it will be like in your own case.” She explains:

Babysitting for other children, having nieces and nephews or much younger siblings—all of these can be wonderful (or horrible) experiences, but they are different in kind from having a child of your very own, perhaps roughly analogous to the way an original artwork has aesthetic value partly because of its origins. . . . Experience with other people’s children might teach you about what it is like to hold a baby, to change diapers or hold a bottle, but not what it is like to create, carry, give birth to and raise a child of your very own .

Before having children, you may enjoy clubbing, skydiving, and LSD; you might find fulfillment in careerism, travel, cooking, or CrossFit; you may simply relish your freedom to do what you want. Having children will deprive you of these joys. And yet, as a parent, you may not miss them. You may actually prefer changing diapers, wrangling onesies, and watching “Frozen.” These activities may sound like torture to the childless version of yourself, but the parental version may find them illuminated by love, and so redeemed. You may end up becoming a different person—a parent. The problem is that you can’t really know, in advance, what “being a parent” is like. For Paul, there’s something thrilling about this quandary. Why should today’s values determine tomorrow’s? In her 2014 book, “Transformative Experience,” she suggests that living “authentically” requires occasionally leaving your old self behind “to create and discover a new self.” Part of being alive is awaiting the “revelation” of “who you’ll become.”

In the months before our son was born, our sense of our ignorance mounted. “We don’t know what we’re waiting for,” my wife said. We knew in advance when he would be born—an ultrasound had revealed that he was unusually big, and a C-section had been scheduled—but the morning of his arrival unfolded with a strange familiarity. I had coffee, toasted an English muffin, and read the news; I packed clothes for the hospital into the bag that I take to work every day. At eleven, my wife and I got into the car. Her mother and a family friend drove us. At the front entrance, we hugged them goodbye.

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“Good luck!” my mother-in-law said. “Your lives are about to change forever!”

“Thanks,” I said. “Where are you guys going?”

“Costco,” she said.

We walked inside. Upstairs, in a curtained-off nook, my wife settled into a hospital bed. For about an hour, we made small talk with the nurses, who guessed at the baby’s weight, and with the surgeon, who happened to be a college classmate of ours. (“ Heyyyyy! ” she said when she arrived.) Occasionally we were left to ourselves. We held hands and looked at each other.

Eventually, an aide helped my wife into a wheelchair. Flanked by two nurses and wearing oversized scrubs, I pushed her down a long hallway toward the operating room. Inside, the doctors were listening to “Stairway to Heaven” on the radio. In the midst of it all, I admired Jimmy Page’s guitar solo. Afterward, I sat in the same hallway holding our baby. I had wondered if, meeting him for the first time, I would feel transformed. I felt like the same old me. And yet none of the words I knew matched the experience I was having. With my hands, I felt him breathing. Quiet and still, warm and awake, he watched me with dark-blue eyes—an actual new person.

Agnes Callard, a philosopher at the University of Chicago, is skeptical about the idea of sudden transformation. She’s also convinced that, no matter how it looks or feels, we choose how we change. In her often moving, quietly profound book “ Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming ,” she writes that “becoming a parent is neither something that just happens to you nor something you decide to have happen to you.” Instead, Callard maintains, we “aspire” to self-transformation by trying on the values that we hope one day to possess, just as we might strike a pose in the mirror before heading out on a date. Of the man in Ullmann-Margalit’s article who feared becoming a boring dad, Callard writes, “By the time he says, ‘Let’s go for it,’ he is actively trying to appreciate the values distinctive of parenthood.” In place of a moment of decision, Callard sees a more gradual process: “Old Person aspires to become New Person.”

Suppose that you sign up for a classical-music-appreciation class, in which your first assignment is to listen to a symphony. You put on headphones, press Play—and fall asleep. The problem is that you don’t actually want to listen to classical music; you just want to want to. Aspiring, Callard thinks, is a common human activity: there are aspiring wine lovers, art appreciators, sports fans, fashionistas, d.j.s, executives, alpinists, do-gooders, parents, and religious believers, all hatching plans to value new things. Many ordinary decisions, moreover—such as choosing between Goldman Sachs and Partners in Health—also touch on the question of who we aspire to become.

Callard distinguishes between aspiration and ambition. Some of the people taking the music-appreciation class are ambitious; they enrolled not because they aspire to love classical music but because the class is an easy A. From the first day, they know what they value: their grades. (“Turning ambition into aspiration is one of the job descriptions of any teacher,” Callard notes.) The ambitious students find it easy to explain why they’re taking the class. But the aspirants must grow comfortable with a certain quantity of awkward pretense. If someone were to ask you why you enrolled, you would be overreaching if you said that you were moved by the profound beauty of classical music. The truth, which is harder to communicate, is that you have some vague sense of its value, which you hope that some future version of yourself might properly grasp.

Until aspirants can fully explain their motivations, they often understate their aims. An aspiring painter will say that she finds painting relaxing rather than try to explain what she hopes to express through her art. An aspiration, Callard concludes, has two faces: a near face, which represents it “as lesser than it is,” and a distant one, which an aspirant is reluctant to describe, because it “ennobles her current activity beyond its rightful status.”

Being a well-meaning phony is key to our self-transformations. “Consider what kind of thinking motivates a good student to force herself to listen to a symphony when she feels herself dozing off,” Callard writes:

She reminds herself that her grade and the teacher’s opinion of her depend on the essay she will write about this piece; or she promises herself a chocolate treat when she gets to the end; or she’s in a glass-walled listening room of the library, conscious of other students’ eyes on her; or perhaps she conjures up a romanticized image of her future, musical self, such as that of entering the warm light of a concert hall on a snowy evening.

These are “bad” reasons for listening to classical music, Callard says, but “ ‘bad’ reasons are how she moves herself forward, all the while seeing them as bad, which is to say, as placeholders for the ‘real’ reason.”

When we’re aspiring, inarticulateness isn’t a sign of unreasonableness or incapacity. In fact, the opposite may be true. “Everyone goes to college ‘to become educated,’ ” Callard observes, “but until I am educated I do not really know what an education is or why it is important.” If we couldn’t aspire to changes that we struggle to describe, we’d be trapped within the ideas that we already have. Our inability to explain our reasons is a measure of how far we wish to travel. It’s only after an aspirant has reached her destination, Callard writes, that “she will say, ‘This was why.’ ”

Because aspirations take a long time to come to fruition, they’re always at risk of interruption. Ullmann-Margalit’s 2006 paper makes mention of someone who opts “to leave the corporate world in order to become an artist.” Callard sees that sort of move as the result of an aspiration—a process that starts small, perhaps with a random stroll through an art museum, and culminates, years later, after one opens a pottery studio. The trouble is that some values preclude others. An aspiring artist must reject the corporate virtues to which he once aspired and embrace creative ones in their place. If a family illness forces him to abandon his artistic plans, he may end up adrift—disenchanted with corporate life, but unable to grasp the real satisfactions of an artistic existence. To aspire, Callard writes, is to judge one’s present-day self by the standards of a future self who doesn’t yet exist. But that can leave us like a spider plant putting down roots in the air, hoping for soil that may never arrive.

Callard revisits Paul’s “What You Can’t Expect When You’re Expecting.” In that paper, Paul explored a strange consequence of the Vegemite Principle: if there’s no rational way to decide to have a child—because you can’t know what you’ve never experienced—then there’s also no rational reason for being disappointed about not having one. (Such disappointment isn’t “wrong, or blameworthy, or subjectively unreasonable,” Paul notes—just nonrational.) Callard disagrees. She sees infertility as a form of interrupted aspiration. An aspiring mother who can’t have children is rational in feeling sad, she writes, and “this is so even if—indeed, it is true in part because—she cannot quite see what she would be missing.”

Before we had our son, I began exploring the “near face” of being a parent. I noticed how cute babies and children could be and pictured our spare room as a nursery; I envisaged my wife and I taking our child to the beach near our house (my version of “entering the warm light of a concert hall on a snowy evening”). I knew that these imaginings weren’t the real facts about having children—clearly, there was more to having kids than cuteness. All the same, I had no way of grasping the “distant face” of fatherhood. It was something I aspired to know.

As it turned out, my wife and I had trouble having children. It took us five years to navigate the infertility maze. For much of that time, we lived with what Callard describes as the “distinctive kind of sadness appropriate to losing something you were only starting to try to get to know.” This sadness, Callard points out, has a complement in the disappointment one might feel after “having to abandon one’s educational aspirations for motherhood”: “The aspiring college student who must give up those dreams to raise a child is liable to feel that she was counting on the college experience to make her life meaningful.” Callard quotes from “Barren in the Promised Land,” a book about infertility by the historian Elaine Tyler May. “The grief—the loss,” a woman tells May. “I spent six years of my life trying to be a mom, and it was beyond my control. For a while I couldn’t look ahead. I thought, how do I define myself if I don’t do this? What am I if not a parent?” It might be easier if our biggest transformations were instantaneous, because then we wouldn’t need to live in states of aspiration. Certain of who we were, we’d never get stuck between selves.

I read “Aspiration” last spring, before my son was born, and I talked about it often with my wife. We were especially struck by Callard’s argument that parenthood is intrinsically aspirational. Parents look forward to a loving relationship with a specific person. And yet that person doesn’t pop into existence fully formed; he emerges, in all his specificity, over many years. For this reason, it makes little sense to be an “ambitious parent”—someone who plans, in advance, what he will love about his child. It’s better to “enter parenthood for the most inchoate of reasons,” Callard concludes, since that “puts our children in a position to fill out what parenthood means for us”; in turn, parental love must “be capable of molding itself to the personality that is, itself, coming to take a determinate shape.”

For the most part, Callard’s book is a systematic overview, situated outside the moment. Still, she writes, for aspirants “what happens in the meanwhile is also life.” Now that our son is here, we live entirely in the meanwhile. We don’t want the present, or its mystery, to end. Each day is absorbing and endlessly significant. Recently, I watched my father’s face as he watched my son’s. Later, we listened as my son learned a new kind of laugh. Each time he looks at us, he sees us more in his own way. Like pages that turn themselves, the meaningful instants follow one another too soon. It’s hard to think of them as stepping stones on the way to anywhere else. ♦

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27 Making Choices in Writing

by Jessie Szalay

DECISIONS, DECISIONS

Are you going to wear a t-shirt or a sweater today? Answer your phone or let it go to voicemail? Eat an apple or a banana? Let your friend pick the show on Netflix or fight for your favorite? We make decisions all day every day, narrowing dozens of options down to a few, often without even noticing, and then selecting our chosen option fairly quickly. (After all, who says you need to wear a shirt at all? It might be a bathrobe day.)

Writing, and all communication, is no different. Deciding whether or not to answer your phone is a decision to engage—the same kind of decision you have to make when it comes to your composition class assignments. What are you going to write about? Each potential topic is like a ring on your phone: “Answer me! Pay attention to me!” But do you want to? Maybe that topic is like your dramatic relative who talks your ear off about old family grudges from the 1970s—too exhausting to think about and leaving you speechless. Or maybe that topic is like an automated phone survey, and you just can’t get interested in the issue. In order to produce the best writing you can—and not be miserable while you’re doing it—you’re going to want to pick a topic that really, truly interests you, with which you are excited to engage, about which you have the resources to learn, and about which you can envision having something to say. After all, writing is an action. By writing, you are entering into a conversation with your readers, with others who have written about the topic, and others who know and/or care about it. Is that a community you want to engage with? A conversation you want to be a part of?

All this thinking sounds like work, right? It is. And it’s just the first of many, many decisions you’re going to make while writing. But it’s necessary.

Making decisions is a fundamental part of writing. The decisions you make will determine the success of your writing. If you make them carelessly, you might end up with unintended consequences—a tone that doesn’t fit your medium or audience, logical fallacies, poor sources or overlooked important ones, or something else.

I’ve often thought of my own writing as a process of selecting. Rather than starting with an empty page, I sometimes feel like I’m starting with every possible phrase, thought, and a dozen dictionaries. There are so many stories I could tell, so many sources I could cite, so many arguments I could make to support my point! There are so many details I could include to make a description more vivid, but using them all would turn my article into a novel. There are so many tones I could take. By making my article funny, maybe more people would read it. But by making it serious, it might appear more trustworthy. What to do? My piece of writing could be so many things, and many of them might be good.

You might have heard the saying, attributed to Michelangelo, “Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.” Each chip in the marble, each word on the page, is a choice to make one thing emerge instead of something else. It’s a selection. It’s up to you to select the best, most rhetorically effective, most interesting, and most beautiful option.

WHERE DO I START?

Deciding on your topic (“the decision to engage,” as termed by The Harbrace Guide to Writing ) is often the first choice you’ll make. Here you’ll find some more decisions you’ll need to make and some ways to think about them.

But first, a note on rhetorical situations. Your rhetorical situation will largely determine what choices you make, so make sure you understand it thoroughly. A rhetorical situation is the situation in which you are writing. It includes your message, your identity as an author, your audience, your purpose, and the context in which you are writing. You’ll read more about the rhetorical situation elsewhere.

These tips assume that you already know the elements of your rhetorical situation, and focus on how to make good choices accordingly.

Genre is the kind of writing you are doing. The term is often applied to art, film, music, etc., as well, such as the science fiction genre. (Here’s a fairly comprehensive list of genres .) In writing, genre can refer to the type of writing: an argumentative essay, a Facebook post, a memoir. Perhaps your genre will be chosen for you in your assignment, perhaps it won’t. Either way, you will have to make some choices. If you’ve been assigned an argumentative essay, you need to learn about the rules of the genre—and then decide how and to what extent you want to follow them.

Form or Mode of Delivery.

This is often similar to genre. For instance, a Facebook post has its own genre rules and conventions, and its mode of delivery is, obviously, Facebook. But sometimes a genre can appear in various forms, i.e. a sci-fi novel and a sci-fi film are the same genre in different forms. You could write your argumentative essay with the intent to have it read online, in a newspaper, or in an academic journal. You might have noticed that many politicians are now laying out their arguments and proposals via series of tweets. This is a calculated decision about the form they are using.

Word Choice.

Something I love about English is that there are so many ways to say things. One of the myriad elements I adore in the English language is that there are thousands of options for phrasing the same idea. I think English is great because it gives you so many choices for how you want to say things. English rocks because you have a gazillion words and phrases for one idea.

Different words work with different tones and audiences and can be used to develop your voice and authority. Get out the thesaurus, but don’t always go for the biggest word. Instead, weigh your options and pick which one you like best and think is most effective.

Sentence Structure and Punctuation.

As with word choice, the English language provides us with thousands of ways to present a single idea in a sentence or paragraph. It’s up to you to choose how you do it. I like to mix up long, complex sentences with multiple clauses and short, direct ones. I love semi-colons, but some people hate them. The same thing goes for em dashes. Some of the most famous authors, like Ernest Hemingway and Herman Melville, are known as much for their sentence structure and punctuation choices as their characters and plots.

Tone is sometimes prescribed by the genre. For instance, your academic biology paper probably should not sound like you’re e-mailing a friend. But there are always choices to make. Whether you sound knowledgeable or snobbish, warm or aloof, lighthearted or serious are matters of tonal choices.

Modes of Appeal.

You’ve probably heard that logos, pathos, and ethos should be in balance with each other, and that can be a good strategy. But you might decide that, for instance, you want to weigh your proposal more heavily toward logic, or your memoir more toward pathos. Think about which modes will most effectively convey what you want to say and reach your readers.

You professor likely gave you a word or page count, which can inform many other decisions you make. But what if there’s no length limit? In higher-level college classes, it’s fairly common to have a lot of leeway with length. Thinking about your purpose and audience can help you decide how long a piece should be. Will your audience want a lot of detail? Would they realistically only read a few pages? Remember that shorter length doesn’t necessarily mean an easier project because you’ll need to be more economical with your words, arguments, and evidence.

Organization and Structure.

Introduction with thesis, body with one argument or counterargument per paragraph, conclusion that restates arguments and thesis. This is the basic formula for academic essays, but it doesn’t mean it’s always the best. What if you put your thesis at the end, or somewhere in the middle? What if you organized your arguments according to their emotional appeal, or in the order the evidence was discovered, or some other way? The way you organize your writing will have a big effect on the way a reader experiences it. It could mean the difference between being engaged throughout and getting bored halfway through.

Detail, Metaphor and Simile, Imagery and Poetic Language.

Creative writers know that anything in the world, even taxes, can be written about poetically. But how much description and beautiful language do you want? The amount of figurative or poetic language you include will change the tone of the paper. It will signal to a reader that they should linger over the beauty of your writing—but not every piece of writing should be lingered over. You probably want the e-mail from your boss to be direct and to the point.

Background Information.

How much does your audience know about the topic, and what do they need to know to understand your writing? Do you want to provide them with the necessary background information or do you want to make them do the work of finding it? If you want to put in background information, where will it go? Do you want to front-load it at the beginning of your writing, or intersperse it throughout, point by point? Do you want to provide a quick sentence summary of the relevant background or a whole paragraph?

These are just some of the elements of writing that you need to make choices about as a writer. Some of them won’t require much internal debate—you’ll just know. Some of them will. Don’t be afraid to sit with your decisions. Making good ones will help ensure your writing is successful.

Essentials for ENGL-121 Copyright © 2016 by David Buck is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Home — Essay Samples — Life — Impact — Making Right Decissions: How Choices Affect Our Lives

Making Right Decissions: How Choices Affect Our Lives

• Categories: Actions Choices Impact

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Published: Apr 2, 2020

Words: 1440 | Pages: 3 | 8 min read

Works Cited

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• Maslow, A. H. (1943). A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review, 50(4), 370-396. doi:10.1037/h0054346
• Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68-78. doi:10.1037/0003-066x.55.1.68
• Seligman, M. E., Steen, T. A., Park, N., & Peterson, C. (2005). Positive psychology progress: Empirical validation of interventions. American Psychologist, 60(5), 410-421. doi:10.1037/0003-066x.60.5.410
• Shoshani, A., & Slone, M. (2013). Middle school transition from the strengths perspective: Young adolescents' character strengths, subjective well-being, and school adjustment. Journal of Happiness Studies, 14(4), 1163-1181. doi:10.1007/s10902-012-9373-7
• Tangney, J. P., Baumeister, R. F., & Boone, A. L. (2004). High self-control predicts good adjustment, less pathology, better grades, and interpersonal success. Journal of Personality, 72(2), 271-324. doi:10.1111/j.0022-3506.2004.00263.x
• Vallerand, R. J., Lalande, D. R., Ratelle, C. F., & Bisonnette, R. (2001). The Academic Motivation Scale: A measure of intrinsic, extrinsic, and amotivation in education. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 60(3), 479-495. doi:10.1177/00131640121971458
• Waters, L. (2011). A review of school-based positive psychology interventions. The Australian Educational and Developmental Psychologist, 28(2), 75-90. doi:10.1375/aedp.28.2.75

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How to Make Better Decisions About Your Career

• Timothy Yen

No, it doesn’t involve a Magic 8-Ball.

Making decisions is hard — especially when you’re trying to make big career decisions. This five-step framework can help you focus on what’s important.

• What are your feelings telling you? Think about the kind of work you’re doing now, or the kind of work you’re planning to do. Brainstorm and jot down ideas of different careers you’re considering. What feelings come up?
• What matters to you? Take a psychological assessment or complete an exercise that will help you identify your values.  Understanding your values will allow you to make choices that align directly with the things you care about.
• What matters to other people? Just as it’s important to get clear on what matters to you, it’s also important to consider how your decision will impact your loved ones. Ask them for their own thoughts, input, and feelings.
• What is the reality of the situation? Be objective and consider the realities surrounding your options, not your assumptions. Otherwise, you might end up having false expectations or feeling disappointed by your choices.
• How do I put the pieces together? Once you’ve answered these four questions, review all the information you’ve just discovered. You should come to your final decision. If you don’t revisit the previous steps.

Where your work meets your life. See more from Ascend here .

Picking your college major, choosing the perfect career, trying to decide if you should leave your job and move to a new one — decisions like these can feel daunting. We all spend a huge amount of time at work, and we all want (and deserve) to love what we do. But the path to finding that work isn’t always clear.

• TY Timothy Yen is a clinical psychologist with a doctorate from Azusa Pacific University, practicing in the East Bay area, and leading conferences and retreats around the globe. Between his years in private practice and another eight years as a Mental Health Staff Sergeant in the US Army, he’s empowered hundreds of individuals, families, organizations, and teams to develop authentic relationships and grow into their best selves. He currently resides in Northern California with his wife and son.

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Decision-Making: Choices and Results Essay

Decision-making is sometimes a complicated process where the best knowledge and understanding of all important factors is considered. The more informed a decision is, the better outcome will result. Picking one decision over another is related to the most benefit that a person wants to get.

A random act of indecision is based on a principle that someone else, sometimes a stranger, decides for you. The best way to accomplish this is to consult someone who has a certain amount of knowledge in the subject. As a social experiment, I decided to ask a computer store worker to choose a program for me, which best deals with my needs. My only preference rested on the kind of program, which related to my field of work. The general requirement was that it must be a program used for writing articles and short stories. The store worker asked me if it had to be a program for a PC, notebook, or IPad. I own a notebook, so I answered which devise I have. He then started offering programs, which differed in layout and functions. I explained to the man that he is the one who has to pick a certain program and I will be satisfied by his own opinion and understanding of what is best. He was somewhat surprised, as people often say what they need specifically. After about 5 minutes of browsing through several programs, he selected one that was called Professional Writing for Pros. When I got home and tried the program, I was very pleased with the decision. Potentially, this way of making a choice is surprising and useful, in cases when there is not much information known about the subject. It was very efficient to let someone more knowledgeable make the decision, as I did not have to spend extra time and effort in familiarizing myself with the subject and make the selection on my own. Another decision that was taken for me was at the local restaurant. Usually, I pick something that I have tried before, so I know what kind of taste it will have. But this time, I let the person sitting next to me choose my meal. I only asked that it be something extravagant, not a usual, everyday selection. The lady started thinking and then was joined by her brother and father. The three of them had a quick recall of foods that they previously had, which were unusual to them. In the end, they came up with a choice of 2 things. One was octopus and the other was a shark’s fin soup. The father and his daughter were recommending octopus because shark’s fin soup has recently become known for its inhumane treatment of sharks. The fishermen would only use the fins and dispose of the rest of the shark. So, their choice was octopus and I was ready to try it. I have never tried octopus before and to say the truth, had a somewhat negative predisposition towards the taste. But the octopus was nicely cooked and had a side order of a seafood salad. I was very glad that I finally tried it because it was delicious. The family stayed several extra minutes to see my reaction and they were happy that I liked it. This sort of decision-making becomes a very positive experience. I believe that people should do this at least sometimes, as it is much unexpected and surprisingly easy.

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Essay on Life Choice

Students are often asked to write an essay on Life Choice in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Life Choice

Understanding life choices.

Life choices are decisions we make about how to live our lives. They can be big, like choosing a career, or small, like deciding what to eat for breakfast. These choices shape who we are and how we experience the world.

Importance of Life Choices

Life choices are important because they shape our future. For example, choosing to study hard can lead to good grades, which can open up opportunities for further education and a good job. On the other hand, making poor choices can lead to difficulties and regrets.

Making Good Life Choices

Making good life choices involves thinking about what you want and what is best for you. It can be helpful to talk to others, like family or teachers, for advice. Also, it’s important to learn from your past choices, both good and bad.

Life Choices and Responsibility

When we make choices, we must also accept the consequences. This is part of growing up and becoming responsible. If we make a mistake, it’s important to learn from it and make better choices in the future.

In conclusion, life choices are an essential part of our lives. They shape our future and help us grow as people. So, it’s important to think carefully and make the best choices we can.

250 Words Essay on Life Choice

What is life choice.

Life choice refers to the decisions we make in our lives. These choices can be about our education, career, or personal life. We make many choices every day. Some are small, like what to eat for breakfast, and some are big, like choosing a career path.

Life choices are important because they shape our future. If we make good choices, we can have a happy and successful life. But if we make bad choices, we can face problems. For example, if we choose to study hard, we can get good grades and have a good career. But if we choose to waste our time, we may not do well in our studies or job.

Making good life choices is not always easy. We need to think about the consequences of our choices. We should also listen to advice from our parents, teachers, and friends. But in the end, we should make our own choices. It’s okay to make mistakes, as long as we learn from them.

In conclusion, life choices are decisions we make that shape our lives. They are important because they can affect our future. We should think carefully before making big life choices. And we should learn from our mistakes. Remember, our life is the result of the choices we make. So, let’s make good choices and have a great life!

500 Words Essay on Life Choice

Life choices are the decisions we make every day. Some are small, like what to eat for breakfast, while others are big, like which career to pursue. These choices shape our lives and determine our future.

The Importance of Life Choices

Life choices are important because they shape our lives. They determine where we live, what we do, who we spend time with, and how we feel. For example, choosing to study hard can lead to good grades, which can open doors to better schools and jobs. On the other hand, choosing to spend all your time playing video games might lead to poor grades and fewer opportunities.

Making good life choices is not always easy. It requires thinking about what you want in life and what is important to you. You need to consider the consequences of your actions and make decisions that will help you reach your goals. For example, if you want to be a doctor, you need to choose to study hard in school and go to medical school.

Learning from Bad Life Choices

Sometimes, we make bad life choices. We may choose to do something that hurts us or someone else. But, we can learn from these choices. We can think about why we made the choice, what went wrong, and how we can make better choices in the future. For example, if you choose to cheat on a test and get caught, you can learn that cheating is wrong and decide to study harder next time.

With life choices comes responsibility. We are responsible for the choices we make and the results they bring. If we make good choices, we can enjoy the rewards. If we make bad choices, we must face the consequences. This is why it’s important to think carefully before making a choice.

The Power of Life Choices

Life choices have the power to change our lives. They can lead to new experiences, friendships, and opportunities. They can also lead to challenges and difficulties. But, no matter what, they help us grow and become who we are.

In conclusion, life choices are a crucial part of our lives. They shape our future, teach us valuable lessons, and help us grow. By making good life choices and learning from our mistakes, we can create a future that we are proud of. Remember, every choice you make today will shape your tomorrow. So choose wisely.

This essay is a total of 500 words. It is a simple and easy-to-understand explanation of the importance and impact of life choices. Even a school-going student can understand it and apply it in their life.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

• Essay on Life Changing Experiences
• Essay on Life Challenges
• Essay on Life Best Experience

Apart from these, you can look at all the essays by clicking here .

Happy studying!

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Jessie Szalay

DECISIONS, DECISIONS

Are you going to wear a t-shirt or a sweater today? Answer your phone or let it go to voicemail? Eat an apple or a banana? Let your friend pick the show on Netflix or fight for your favorite? We make decisions all day every day, narrowing dozens of options down to a few, often without even noticing, and then selecting our chosen option fairly quickly. (After all, who says you need to wear a shirt at all? It might be a bathrobe day.)

Writing, and all communication, is no different. Deciding whether or not to answer your phone is a decision to engage—the same kind of decision you have to make when it comes to your composition class assignments. What are you going to write about? Each potential topic is like a ring on your phone: “Answer me! Pay attention to me!” But do you want to? Maybe that topic is like your dramatic relative who talks your ear off about old family grudges from the 1970s—too exhausting to think about and leaving you speechless. Or maybe that topic is like an automated phone survey, and you just can’t get interested in the issue. In order to produce the best writing you can—and not be miserable while you’re doing it—you’re going to want to pick a topic that really, truly interests you, with which you are excited to engage, about which you have the resources to learn, and about which you can envision having something to say. After all, writing is an action. By writing, you are entering into a conversation with your readers, with others who have written about the topic, and others who know and/or care about it. Is that a community you want to engage with? A conversation you want to be a part of?

All this thinking sounds like work, right? It is. And it’s just the first of many, many decisions you’re going to make while writing. But it’s necessary.

Making decisions is a fundamental part of writing. The decisions you make will determine the success of your writing. If you make them carelessly, you might end up with unintended consequences—a tone that doesn’t fit your medium or audience, logical fallacies, poor sources or overlooked important ones, or something else.

I’ve often thought of my own writing as a process of selecting. Rather than starting with an empty page, I sometimes feel like I’m starting with every possible phrase, thought, and a dozen dictionaries. There are so many stories I could tell, so many sources I could cite, so many arguments I could make to support my point! There are so many details I could include to make a description more vivid, but using them all would turn my article into a novel. There are so many tones I could take. By making my article funny, maybe more people would read it. But by making it serious, it might appear more trustworthy. What to do? My piece of writing could be so many things, and many of them might be good.

You might have heard the saying, attributed to Michelangelo, “Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.” Each chip in the marble, each word on the page, is a choice to make one thing emerge instead of something else. It’s a selection. It’s up to you to select the best, most rhetorically effective, most interesting, and most beautiful option.

WHERE DO I START?

Deciding on your topic (“the decision to engage,” as termed by The Harbrace Guide to Writing ) is often the first choice you’ll make. Here you’ll find some more decisions you’ll need to make and some ways to think about them.

But first, a note on rhetorical situations. Your rhetorical situation will largely determine what choices you make, so make sure you understand it thoroughly. A rhetorical situation is the situation in which you are writing. It includes your message, your identity as an author, your audience, your purpose, and the context in which you are writing. You’ll read more about the rhetorical situation elsewhere.

These tips assume that you already know the elements of your rhetorical situation, and focus on how to make good choices accordingly.

Genre is the kind of writing you are doing. The term is often applied to art, film, music, etc., as well, such as the science fiction genre. (Here’s a fairly comprehensive list of genres .) In writing, genre can refer to the type of writing: an argumentative essay, a Facebook post, a memoir. Perhaps your genre will be chosen for you in your assignment, perhaps it won’t. Either way, you will have to make some choices. If you’ve been assigned an argumentative essay, you need to learn about the rules of the genre—and then decide how and to what extent you want to follow them.

Form or Mode of Delivery.

This is often similar to genre. For instance, a Facebook post has its own genre rules and conventions, and its mode of delivery is, obviously, Facebook. But sometimes a genre can appear in various forms, i.e. a sci-fi novel and a sci-fi film are the same genre in different forms. You could write your argumentative essay with the intent to have it read online, in a newspaper, or in an academic journal. You might have noticed that many politicians are now laying out their arguments and proposals via series of tweets. This is a calculated decision about the form they are using.

Word Choice.

Something I love about English is that there are so many ways to say things. One of the myriad elements I adore in the English language is that there are thousands of options for phrasing the same idea. I think English is great because it gives you so many choices for how you want to say things. English rocks because you have a gazillion words and phrases for one idea.

Different words work with different tones and audiences and can be used to develop your voice and authority. Get out the thesaurus, but don’t always go for the biggest word. Instead, weigh your options and pick which one you like best and think is most effective.

Sentence Structure and Punctuation.

As with word choice, the English language provides us with thousands of ways to present a single idea in a sentence or paragraph. It’s up to you to choose how you do it. I like to mix up long, complex sentences with multiple clauses and short, direct ones. I love semi-colons, but some people hate them. The same thing goes for em dashes. Some of the most famous authors, like Ernest Hemingway and Herman Melville, are known as much for their sentence structure and punctuation choices as their characters and plots.

Tone is sometimes prescribed by the genre. For instance, your academic biology paper probably should not sound like you’re e-mailing a friend. But there are always choices to make. Whether you sound knowledgeable or snobbish, warm or aloof, lighthearted or serious are matters of tonal choices.

Modes of Appeal.

You’ve probably heard that logos, pathos, and ethos should be in balance with each other, and that can be a good strategy. But you might decide that, for instance, you want to weigh your proposal more heavily toward logic, or your memoir more toward pathos. Think about which modes will most effectively convey what you want to say and reach your readers.

You professor likely gave you a word or page count, which can inform many other decisions you make. But what if there’s no length limit? In higher-level college classes, it’s fairly common to have a lot of leeway with length. Thinking about your purpose and audience can help you decide how long a piece should be. Will your audience want a lot of detail? Would they realistically only read a few pages? Remember that shorter length doesn’t necessarily mean an easier project because you’ll need to be more economical with your words, arguments, and evidence.

Organization and Structure.

Introduction with thesis, body with one argument or counterargument per paragraph, conclusion that restates arguments and thesis. This is the basic formula for academic essays, but it doesn’t mean it’s always the best. What if you put your thesis at the end, or somewhere in the middle? What if you organized your arguments according to their emotional appeal, or in the order the evidence was discovered, or some other way? The way you organize your writing will have a big effect on the way a reader experiences it. It could mean the difference between being engaged throughout and getting bored halfway through.

Detail, Metaphor and Simile, Imagery and Poetic Language.

Creative writers know that anything in the world, even taxes, can be written about poetically. But how much description and beautiful language do you want? The amount of figurative or poetic language you include will change the tone of the paper. It will signal to a reader that they should linger over the beauty of your writing—but not every piece of writing should be lingered over. You probably want the e-mail from your boss to be direct and to the point.

Background Information.

How much does your audience know about the topic, and what do they need to know to understand your writing? Do you want to provide them with the necessary background information or do you want to make them do the work of finding it? If you want to put in background information, where will it go? Do you want to front-load it at the beginning of your writing, or intersperse it throughout, point by point? Do you want to provide a quick sentence summary of the relevant background or a whole paragraph?

These are just some of the elements of writing that you need to make choices about as a writer. Some of them won’t require much internal debate—you’ll just know. Some of them will. Don’t be afraid to sit with your decisions. Making good ones will help ensure your writing is successful.

Open English @ SLCC Copyright © 2016 by Jessie Szalay is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Essay About Choices

Life is full of choices. We are constantly making decisions, big and small. Some of these choices are easy, while others are more difficult. Sometimes we make the right choice, and sometimes we make the wrong choice. But what is the right choice? And how do we make sure that we make the right choices in life?

There is no easy answer to this question. Life is complex, and there are often many factors to consider when making a decision. But there are some general principles that can help guide our decision making.

One important principle is to consider all of the possible outcomes of our choices. This means thinking about not just the immediate consequences, but also the long-term effects of our decisions. For example, if we are considering whether or not to smoke cigarettes, we should not just think about the immediate consequences (e.g., the pleasure of smoking or the short-term health effects). We should also consider the long-term consequences of our decision (e.g., the risk of cancer or other health problems down the road).

Another important principle is to consider the risks and rewards of each choice. This means weighing the potential benefits and drawbacks of each option. For example, if we are considering whether or not to invest in a new business venture, we should think about both the risks (e.g., the possibility of failure) and rewards (e.g. the potential for financial gain).

Finally, it is important to consult with others when making important life decisions. This means talking to people who have more experience than we do, and who can offer helpful advice and perspective. For example, if we are considering whether or not to move to a new city, we should talk to people who have already made the move, and who can tell us about their experiences.

Making the right choices in life is not always easy. But by following these general principles, we can increase our chances of making good decisions.

We make choices every day that have the potential to define our future and direct our lives. Each choice we make has an influence on our life, whether for better or for worse. Some of the decisions I’ve made in the past have had bad results due to previous experiences. It is through such decisions that we learn and develop as people.

Life is all about learning and making decisions; some of which will be wrong, but we mustn’t dwell on them. Life is too short to live with regret.

According to psychologists, our decision-making is based on a number of different factors: our emotions, our values, our experiences and the environment we are in at the time. Our emotions play a big role in how we make decisions. For example, if we are feeling happy we are more likely to take risks than if we are feeling sad. This is because when we are happy we feel like we can handle anything that comes our way. However, when we are sad or angry, we tend to play it safe as we don’t want to make things worse.

Our values also influence our decision-making. For instance, if we value money above all else, we are more likely to make decisions that will help us earn more money, even if it means compromising our morals. On the other hand, if we value family or friends above all else, we are more likely to make decisions that will benefit them, even if it means sacrificing our own needs.

Our experiences also play a role in how we make decisions. If we have had bad experiences in the past, we may be hesitant to make similar choices in the future. For example, if we have been hurt emotionally by someone in the past, we may be less likely to open up to new people in the future.

Finally, the environment we are in can also influence our decision-making. If we are in a safe and secure environment, we may be more likely to take risks than if we are in a dangerous or unstable environment.

All of these factors play a role in how we make decisions. Sometimes, we may not even be aware of them. However, it is important to be aware of them so that we can make better choices in life.

Many options, on the other hand, result in gratifying and pleasurable outcomes. The majority of our decisions will impact not just us but frequently those around us as well. Because the potential influence that decisions may have on people around us is significant, it’s critical that we make certain selections carefully and consider them thoroughly.

Life is full of choices. Some of them are very small and some of them are very large but each one is important nonetheless. The choices that we make often shape the course of our lives and can have a profound impact on our future.

Some people believe that life is nothing more than a series of random events that happen to us without any control on our part. However, other people believe that we do have some control over our lives and that the choices we make can influence the direction our lives take. No matter what your beliefs are, it is important to realize that the choices you make in life can have a significant impact on your future.

Many times, the choices we make are based on our values and beliefs. Values are the things that are important to us and that guide our behavior. Beliefs are the ideas or convictions that we hold to be true. Our choices should be based on our values and beliefs because they are what is important to us and what we believe in.

Sometimes, the choices we make are based on our emotions. Emotions are powerful things and can sometimes override our reason or logic. This can lead to making impulsive decisions that we may later regret. It is important to try to stay level-headed when making decisions so that our emotions don’t get the best of us.

The choices we make can also be influenced by peer pressure. Peer pressure is when we feel like we need to do something because everyone else is doing it. This can be a very strong influence, especially for young people. It is important to remember that we don’t have to do something just because everyone else is doing it. We should only do what we feel is right for us.

Making choices is an important part of life. The choices we make can shape the course of our lives and affect our future. It is important to make sure that our choices are based on our values and beliefs and not on our emotions. We should also be aware of peer pressure and not let it influence our decisions. Life is full of choices, so make them wisely!

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Revisiting a leader’s most important choices.

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Strategy on a napkin

The headline has a double meaning. First, this article will revisit the idea of the most important choices. Secondly, leaders must revisit and reiterate those choices with their followers on a regular basis. The fundamental premise is that there are almost always a very small set of choices that have the greatest impact. Everything else flows from them. You have to make the right choices, align all around those choices, and follow through to ensure they are executed well.

Make the right choices

Michael Porter taught us that strategy is choosing what not to do. If the other choice doesn’t make any sense, you’re not really making a choice. Going one step further, as my partner, Harry Kangis, used to say, “Choosing not to do something that’s a bad idea is easy. The hard thing is choosing not to do something that’s a good idea for someone else - but not for you.”

On the one hand, growing revenue and cutting costs seems like they should always work. On the other hand, some companies have done really really well shrinking overall revenue to focus on the most profitable customers. Other companies have done really really well increasing costs to allow them to over-deliver to a small set of customers willing to pay for a higher level of quality.

Porter’s Monitor group said the essence of strategy was choosing where to play and how to win. It’s about focus and differentiation.

Years ago, I ran an imperative workshop with one leadership team. We spent two hours getting the wording of their strategies to where they wanted them. When we were done, we had this conversation.

I asked, “Do you all agree these are the right strategies?”

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“So you know, if we walk out of here with those as your strategies, I’m going to sell your stock short first thing tomorrow morning.”

“Because you’re going to lose.”

“Which of these strategies are things your main competitor could not do?”

“None. They could do all of them.”

We spent another two hours and came up with strategies that would work.

And the right choices are different at different times. Jack Welch built GE’s value over twenty years partly by taking the lesson from the automobile industry’s profit pools. While the vast majority of revenue in automobiles was in sales and service, the real profits were in financing and warranties. Welch applied that to all of GE’s markets and put in place GE Capital to finance customers’ purchases of jet engines and the like. Ultimately, GE Capital accounted for about half of GE’s total profits.

The trouble was that meant GE was regulated like it was a bank and restricted other things it could do. So, Welch’s successor, Jeff Immelt, dismantled GE Capital. But he stumbled on replacing the profits with massive failures in acquiring Enron’s Wind Business and then Alstrom Power . Immelt was out of central casting as CEO: Dartmouth, Harvard Business School, Procter & Gamble and then years at GE. Still, his choices destroyed a tremendous amount of value.

Align all around the choices

There’s a relatively simple exercise to run with your leadership team. Ask each member to write down what they think are the organization’s top three priorities. Ideally, they’d each write down the same three things. The more different ideas come out, the less the team is aligned.

Follow through to execute well

Winning strategies pass the napkin test by being simple enough that you can lay them out on a napkin. This is really a measure of clarity and ease of comprehension. It’s import goes well beyond being a bar trick. Executing well requires everyone involved to understand what they need to do and how that fits with what everyone else is doing – clarity and ease of comprehension.

As a leader, you’re going to get tired of revisiting and repeating your message and your core choices well before everyone else understands them. Get over it. It’s a key part of your job.

Choose. Align. Execute.

It is actually that simple – and that hard. It’s easier to make lots of little choices. But they’ll have little impact. It’s easier to rely on your direct reports to drive alignment through the organization. But things get lost in translation. It’s easier to assume people will do their jobs. But winners follow through.

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Bumble drops controversial ad poking fun at celibacy, abstinence, issues apology

Bumble has fumbled, working quickly fix the damage caused by an ad campaign that pokes fun at celibacy and abstinence as a long-term dating solution. 

The company apologized for the blunder on social media, days after social media users began to criticize Bumble’s new taglines online.

People, particularly women, were quick to point out that the tone of the ads was anything but empowering, using shame to coerce women into getting back on the app, one user wrote. 

“Bumble doing a campaign attempting to shame celibacy/abstinence is an unserious way to tell the public y'all are nervous,”  Cindy Noir wrote on X , formerly known as Twitter. “It’s also a very offensive way to tell your female customers that you’re profiting off of their legs being open.” 

The taglines, which ran in commercial and billboards, were part of a larger “transformation plan” announced in February to bring people back to the app. The company cut 350 employees then in an attempt to “better align its operating model with future strategic priorities and to drive stronger operating leverage.” 

Here’s what we know. 

Bumble ad 'undermines' a woman's choice, others say it was just a 'bad ad'

A majority of the people who have come across Bumble's new ad and have posted about it online are pretty insulted by what the ad seems to insinuate. Others said the ad was just bad, writing that there was nothing controversial about it.

Here's what everyone's been saying about the Bumble ad online.

Bumbles pulls ads, plans to make donations to non-profit groups

Bumble says the choice to run the ad campaigns with those messages, including “You know full well a vow of celibacy is not the answer” and “Thou shalt not give up on dating and become a nun” were intended to lean into a community frustrated by modern dating. 

“And instead of bringing joy and humor, we unintentionally did the opposite,” the company wrote. 

The company decided to pull the ads from its global marketing campaign after hearing multiple perspectives, writing that it failed its mission of “passionately standing up for women and marginalized communities, and their right to fully exercise personal choice.” 

The company's statement said it will be making a donation to the National Domestic Violence Hotline and other organizations that support women, marginalized communities and those impacted by abuse. 

These “partners” will also have the chance to run an ad of their choice in the place of Bumble’s stripped ad.

“Please keep speaking up and telling us how we can be better. We care about you and will always be here for you,” the statement reads.

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Maple Leafs head coach candidates: Why Craig Berube, Bruce Boudreau are good fits for Toronto

For just the third time in nine years, the Toronto Maple Leafs need a new head coach.

Given how NHL coaches quickly hop on and off the coaching carousel every summer, the stability the Leafs have had behind the bench sets them apart. Sheldon Keefe’s four-and-a-half-year tenure made him the fifth-longest active serving coach in the NHL .

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But with Keefe’s firing on Thursday, that streak is over, and beginning next season, there will be a new voice directing traffic inside Scotiabank Arena.

Who will that coach be?

When Leafs president Brendan Shanahan moved on from former GM Kyle Dubas, he was serious about finding a replacement with experience. The same will likely hold for the organization’s next significant hire. The Leafs are not in the player development phase. Instead, a coach with a lengthy CV will likely be required to push this team over the hump and closer to their Stanley Cup aspirations.

Let’s consider some of the options available (or not) right now.

Craig Berube

The odds-on favourite out of the gates to replace Keefe. And that’s because Craig Berube ticks every box imaginable in terms of what Shanahan and Leafs GM Brad Treliving likely desire in a head coach.

Lengthy experience as a tough-as-nails player? Check.

Nearly just as many seasons spent behind NHL benches? Yep.

And at least optically speaking, most important: Can Berube arrive wearing a Stanley Cup ring?

Berube sparked a St. Louis Blues team that had a history of falling short in the playoffs to their first and only Stanley Cup after taking over midway through the 2018-19 season. He did so with a hard-nosed approach and you get the sense that matters to Shanahan and Treliving.

Let go in the middle of this season due in large part to inconsistent results and, forgive me if you’ve heard this before, an underperforming power play, Berube is still hungry to get back into the coaching game. Being brief, direct but emotionally involved as Berube is could set him up for success in Toronto.

“I want to make sure I’m going to a good organization,” he told The Athletic in December. “You want to work with good people, and you always want an opportunity to win. I want to coach, but I want to make sure that it’s the right situation.”

Gerard Gallant  

If it’s truly experience Shanahan and Treliving want, they could do a lot worse than Gallant. An NHL lifer with 17 seasons coaching in the league and a Jack Adams Award, Gallant has seen a lot. He’s gotten close to a Stanley Cup, losing in the 2018 final with the Vegas Golden Knights. In his most recent stint with the New York Rangers, Gallant became the first coach in franchise history to guide the team to back-to-back 100-point seasons.

Gallant was then fired by the Rangers after last season when the Rangers exited the playoffs in the first round. So, he certainly seems to understand the fact that the NHL is a results-oriented business.

What might work against him is his age: At 61, he’s the second-oldest coach on this list. If the Leafs want someone who can steer the ship for a long stretch, you wonder if they consider that. That said, Gallant has a history of giving teams a healthy jolt before moving on within three seasons.

“I think people know (I’m available),” Gallant said in January. “They know I want to coach again so if the opportunity comes up, I’d be happy to.”  

Rod Brind’Amour

Yes, Brind’Amour is still coaching, having guided the Carolina Hurricanes to the second round of the playoffs.

And yes, it’s been continually suggested that Brind’Amour – in the final year of his contract – will re-up with the Hurricanes soon enough.

But, also, yes: The Leafs have to at least do their due diligence and see if one of the best coaches in the NHL and a Jack Adams Award-winner would consider coming to Toronto. How could he not be the top choice for the Leafs, given his relentless mentality, results and how well he connects with players?

The Hurricanes are the kind of razor-sharp, smart organization the Leafs have long wanted to be. That they want to keep Brind’Amour presents every reason for the Leafs to see if they could entice him to come to Toronto.

This might remain a pipe dream for Leafs fans. But hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.

Todd McLellan

Like a few others on this list, McLellan is rich with experience. He hasn’t bounced around a lot, spending time with just four organizations in his 19 seasons of NHL coaching.

Heading back to his first gig as an assistant with the Detroit Red Wings, McLellan ran a wildly efficient power play and won a Stanley Cup in 2008. Even with that experience, his teams can lock it down defensively, which could prepare the Leafs for the playoffs.

Most recently, McLellan spent four-and-a-half seasons as coach of an up-and-coming Los Angeles Kings team. He exited in the first round in his final two full seasons but also did so with a youngish roster.

McLellan was fired by the Kings in February. Toward the end of his tenure, especially after a 5-3 loss to the Buffalo Sabres on Jan. 24, he appeared unafraid to call out his struggling team. That hasn’t happened enough in Toronto as of late.

“The stupidity that went into that loss is beyond explainable,” McLellan said after the loss. “When you look at the team that played the first 25-30 games, if you will, it doesn’t look like the team that’s playing right now, and I’m responsible for it.”

John Gruden

The Toronto Marlies head coach does not have any head coach experience in the NHL, but was still an assistant for the Bruins during their record-setting 2022-23 campaign before being scooped up for the Leafs’ AHL team.

With a roster lacking high-end talent, Gruden learned the Leafs organization and got the Marlies back into the playoffs this season. Behind the scenes, many Marlies and the organization itself felt Gruden’s hardened approach was needed and worked wonders to push players toward success.

Optically, you can understand why some fans might be skeptical of another Marlies coach being promoted to run the Leafs bench. However, Gruden’s experience with NHL teams shouldn’t be overlooked and his familiarity with some of the team’s younger players – combined with his coaching philosophy – makes him worthy of inclusion here.\

Bruce Boudreau

The sentimental choice.

Boudreau spent parts of seven seasons as a Leafs forward and understands what winning in this market means to a city and its fanbase. He’s only ever been a head coach in the NHL and has done so for 15 seasons with four teams.

Let’s talk persona: Who doesn’t love Boudreau’s uplifting approach to coaching and man management?

Boudreau has never won a Stanley Cup but you could do a lot worse than employing someone with a .626 winning percentage in the regular season. Among coaches with at least 1,000 games of experience, that’s second all-time.

After being unfairly treated and then axed by Vancouver Canucks management midway through last season, Boudreau has remained in the media as a television analyst. He’s long been floated by voices throughout the hockey world as a decent fit to get the Leafs out of their losing ways. Would that work for a full season or is he more of the type to come in mid-season and remind the team the end of the world is far, far away?

It’s hard to find someone on this list who would handle the noise and media attention that comes with coaching the Leafs better than Boudreau. But, and it’s not a small but: Boudreau is the oldest coach on this list at 69. Like Gallant, if the Leafs want long-term stability behind the bench (which they should) they might end up going a bit younger.  

David Carle

The up-and-comer on the list.

After winning his second NCAA national championship with the University of Denver in three years this spring – just months after coaching the United States to a world juniors gold medal – Carle has earned the reputation of being arguably the best coach outside of the pro ranks.

At 34, by far the youngest coach on this list, he very likely has a long NHL career ahead of him.

Would the Leafs want to jump to the front of the pack, challenge the status quo and bring in Carle just as they did a decade ago by bringing in Kyle Dubas from the OHL?

On one hand, if they want a winner, Carle has shown he gets results. On the other, his recent work with young players suggests he might be a better fit for a team focused more on player development right now like, say, the San Jose Sharks.

Sometimes successful coaches outside the NHL are wary of starting as assistants. Keefe, for example, was adamant about becoming a head coach out of the AHL instead of an assistant. But if Carle is into the idea of running one of the Leafs special teams and connecting with younger players, the Leafs should already have gotten in touch.

Bylsma, you’ll remember, took over the Pittsburgh Penguins midseason in 2008-09 in his first NHL head coaching gig. Months later, Bylsma and the Penguins won a Stanley Cup. So, the man knows how to provide a spark.

He continued to push the Penguins to the postseason over the following five seasons in Pittsburgh and won a Jack Adams Award along the way.

Bylsma’s next two seasons as head coach of the Buffalo Sabres didn’t yield any postseason success (or any postseason appearances whatsoever) but the roster feels more to blame there.

After moving to the AHL – Bylsma is in the middle of his second season with the AHL’s Coachella Valley Firebirds – he’s gotten back to his winning ways. Bylsma took his team to Game 7 of the AHL’s Calder Cup Final last year, came up just short and is in the middle of another successful season right now. And he’s done so with a so-so Seattle Kraken prospect pool. This is a coach deserving of another NHL opportunity. And given the calibre of stars he’s worked with in the past, moving to Toronto might not be a shock to his system.

Jay Woodcroft

There’s more to Woodcroft than the parts of three seasons he recently spent as head coach of the Edmonton Oilers. He has 13 seasons of experience as either an NHL assistant or a video coach for teams with some of the world’s biggest stars such as Connor McDavid, Joe Thornton and Pavel Datsyuk. He’s been part of Stanley Cup champions (2008 Red Wings) and has seen teams get close (2009 and 2010 San Jose Sharks).

Sure, there might be questions about Woodcroft because of how similar the makeup of the Leafs and the Oilers are and the results the Oilers have gotten since he was given his walking papers in Nov. 2023. But he still has a lot working for him: Woodcroft is a local guy who, like others on this list, knows the market. If Leafs management think positivity is the answer, Woodcroft’s progressive and thoughtful attitude should put him high on the list.

Plus, if you take McDavid at his word and believe what he said after Woodcroft’s firing, (“I know the narrative out there, couldn’t be further from the truth,” McDavid said) the former Oilers coach wasn’t the reason that team stumbled out of the gate this year. The team’s league-worst .864 save percentage before he was fired probably has more to do with it.

Like many people on this list, Woodcroft is a talented and smart coach and deserves to be in the NHL.

Dean Evason

Evason’s fiery attitude and no-nonsense approach might be what the doctor ordered in Toronto. He wants his players to play as hard as they can, and won’t stop pushing them until they get there. Accountability is important to Evason. That feels like the kind of coach Treliving might want.

The results he’s achieved, however, might work against him. Evason spent seven seasons as an assistant with the Washington Capitals before moving to the Minnesota Wild organization. As both an assistant and eventual head coach, Evason’s Wild teams never got past the first round of the playoffs.

The indefinable qualities within his persona, though, are sure to keep him in the running.

(Top photo of Craig Berube: Ron Chenoy / USA Today)

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Joshua Kloke is a staff writer who has covered the Maple Leafs and Canadian soccer for The Athletic since 2016. Previously, he was a freelance writer for various publications, including Sports Illustrated. Follow Joshua on Twitter @ joshuakloke