The Art of Impulsive Decision Making

 

One thing about me growing up is that I was always an overthinker. Still am on some occasions, but lately ive been discovering the significance of making impulsive decisions. Not thinking, and just doing. That’s the only way I’ve been able to get over my fear of failing. When I give myself too much time to think about all the bad things that can happen with it, it starts to outweigh the positive outcomes, which I know isn’t right. And it wasn’t until last year that I realized how important it was to just go with your gut and what your heart wants, and stop listening to your brain so much. I’d like to dedicate this blog post to one big decision I made last year that changed my life. That was buying a ticket to Japan. I remember the day of, I walked to work crying. In the dark. In the rain. It was the perfect main character moment. All I could think about was how sick I was of that job, and how badly I wanted to quit. I was so tired, and was so sick of how lame my life was. I was stuck doing the same thing everyday, and realized that I became the one thing in life I feared the most- an average working citizen. Growing up, I always knew I wanted to travel the world, but I always saw it as something I would just do eventually. I never had any plans to do anything, I just told myself “it’ll happen. Not now, not soon, but one day. Hopefully”. Anyways, I finally got off my shift, somehow in a worse mood than I was in the morning, and thought about how I couldn’t do this another day. And I wouldn’t. It was late in the evening, I was scrolling expedia. Ah yes. A ticket to Japan. How crazy would that be… if i just bought it… non refundable…. No one could stop me.. And oops. My finger slipped!! And there I was just sitting there having just purchased a $3000 roundtrip flight to tokyo for a month with absolutely no plan whatsoever. No thoughts, no money, no plan, just a plane ticket and a dream. And I had two weeks to prepare. It wasn’t until the next morning that I realized what I had done. Freshly graduated high school, just turned 18 less than a month ago, don’t know how to start the laundry machine and now I need to figure out how to navigate a foreign country by myself. In less than a month. So yeah I was pretty much just scared shitless for the next two weeks, working my ass off to save enough money to nourish me throughout my trip, with no help from my parents (my dad just laughed and my mom disowned me (literally (but she apologized since then)) and forcing as much japanese vocabulary into my small brain as it could hold. And then the day came. And as soon as I stepped foot through the security I cried. Very loudly. And for a long time. Got lots of weird looks but I mean its an airport. I'm sure it's not the worse they've seen. But I pushed through it, knowing it was going to be the biggest adventure of my lifetime. And when I got there, there was not a single ounce of regret in my body. Now that I look back on it, I learned more about the world in that single month I spent in Japan than anything in school could’ve ever taught me. I dove head first into such a beautiful new culture, new country, new language with so many amazing new people. And yeah, I was literally scared out of my mind when I got there, but I took things one step at a time. Where I needed to go, how I needed to get there, what I needed to do when I’m there. It taught me just how big the world is. And how little of it I’ve seen so far. There’s so much more to explore and with that one stupid impulsive decision, I got one step closer to traveling the entire world. If I had looked at that expedia page too long, and started to overthink about all that could go wrong (which is a lot of things when it comes to me), i would've never done it. And yeah, a lot of things DID go wrong, but that made it all the more fun. It taught me things about myself I never would have learned if I had just stayed here in Stony Plain slinging burgers. I put myself out there, learned a new language, explored so many beautiful new places and met so many new people, and overall it was just such an incredible experience that never would've happened if I had let fear take over. Now, its 2023, and this mindset has taken over so many parts of my life. From getting to the gym to booking plane tickets, sometimes not thinking about it and just doing it is the only way to get it done. And who knows what kind of adventures you’ll get out of it. Might be amazing, might suck. But it’s one more adventure than you would’ve had if you didn't take the chance. So might as well just do it.