Decisions

“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.” – Voltaire

I am inanely annoyed by most sports broadcast analysts.  They get paid handsomely to repeat recycled comments week after week after week.  Gee, did you hear Adrian Peterson has a firm handshake?  Did you know Kobe and Shaq had a falling out?  Did you know whenever the [insert team] play the [insert team] you can throw the records out the window? 

What bothers me most, though, is the way these suits in the booth second-guess everything on the field or court.  And they do it with such certainty.  If they know so much better, why are they not coaching themselves?  We’re all entitled to our own opinions, and we’re likely to disagree from time to time with the decisions made by our beloved sports authorities, but what gain can come from berating their every move?

When it comes to decisions, we all make bad ones.  Coaches.  Players.  Actors.  Moms.  Dads.  But we all make good ones, too.  I have a theory that while bad decisions are very much a part of everyone’s life, wrong decisions do not exist.  Just as every action has an equal and opposite reaction (thank you, Mr. Newton), every wrong has to have an opposite right.  Otherwise, how could we be assured it is wrong?

Once a decision is made, there is no way of ever knowing what the result of an opposite decision would have been, unless we are Bill Murray in Groundhog’s Day.  We can speculate, and in many cases the speculation leads us to believe strongly that a different decision would have yielded a better result.  But that’s the key – it’s speculation.

So I’m living my life knowing that every decision I make is the right decision.  Don’t get me wrong, many (maybe most?) of those right decisions are still very bad decisions, but at least I don’t have to burden myself with worries of making a wrong decision.  Good or bad, I can only make right decisions.

Time will tell if my decision to spend money I don’t have on a trip I can’t afford will prove to be good or bad.  I know it was the right decision and I’m glad I made it when I did.  I met many wonderful people and learned from some of the great screenwriters working today.  I’ll share in the coming entries some notes I took from the 2009 Screenwriting Expo.

If I’m lucky, some expert sports announcers will critique all the notes…