If you are a hyper-driven achiever, you’ll always chase opportunity. You will always want to be, do, and have more. This is a great thing, but if not checked, can lead to burnout. Just because something could be done doesn’t mean it should be done. Opportunity does not mean obligation.

Simply having an opportunity presented to you does not mean you have to take it…or even should take it. You can easily run yourself into the ground because you jump at everything in front of you. This is especially true for young people who want to prove themselves. They feel they need to accept and execute on every opportunity that is possible. But in doing so, they spread themselves too thin causing chaos in their productivity.

Sure, we should be ambitious and agile, but we have to be careful of becoming too mindless. Disaster occurs when your mouth commits to something your brain is not in. You can’t say yes to every opportunity that comes your way. You have to understand that every time you jump at opportunity there is a tradeoff that occurs. Remember Newton’s third law: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. When you say yes to one thing, you are saying no to something else. Economist call this an Opportunity Cost. Basically, for every opportunity you either say yes to or no to, there is a price tag that comes with it. 

When an opportunity arises as the fork in the road always know there is a toll depending on what path you take. Remember: just because you could do something doesn’t mean you should. You need to ask yourself, “Should I do this?” Followed by the question, “Is this the most valuable thing I could be doing?”

Will we always get it right when we choose one opportunity over the other? No, but we can dramatically raise our percentages of choosing the right path when we slow down enough to consider the opportunity cost involved in our decision.

Here are three quick tips for making better decisions:

1) Play Out The Opportunity

Take the opportunity in front of you and play out the experience in your head as best as you can. Sometimes simply thinking through the path we are considering taking can give us incredible insight on what may happen. You don’t know the future, but you can make your best decisions when you have taken time to envision the result. 

2) Step Out With Your Best Guess

It would be extraordinary to know about everything in life before it happened, but life doesn’t allow us that luxury. While my seventeen-year-old nephew was thinking about who he was going to ask to the prom, a pretty girl approached him at school and said, “Hey, if you were to ask me to prom, I wouldn’t say no.” The rest is history. Wouldn’t life be great if we knew the outcome before we had to step out and take a risk? Even though 20/20 foresight would be infinitely better than 20/20 hindsight, we can still step out with our best guess and do our best with what we know. 

3) Take Out The Lessons You Learn

You can’t improve a result until you get a result, so just let it go and learn from it. Assess the situation and see if it gave you the result you expected. If it did, then great, you chose the right path. If you didn’t, then great, you can learn from it and calibrate your future decisions based on the wisdom you gained. Be sure to take out the lessons you learn from every opportunity you experience and you’ll make better decisions in the future.