How I learned to be decisive...

When I was younger, I always really as impressed by people who were decisive, resolute, committed, etc, and thought it was some kind of super power, because I didn't seem to be able to decide what to eat for lunch.

This impression led me to endlessly talk about my various heroes in order to feel more like them, as well as to push myself to publicly boast about grand projects I would launch and gestures I would make, and gather self-help material. None of this really improved things.

What I eventually learned was that by focusing on dramatic world historical massive acts of personal volition or existentialist stunts is not really that helpful. In fact it can lead you to approach every day life with a bombastic and melodramatic attitude where even decisions that should be easy become hard because you put too much weight on them. It can also make you feel inferior and desperate for validation and guidance, undermining your own sense of agency.

Finally what I started understanding is that strength of will isn't really a super power, it is a normal human function which is built up through gradually gaining trust in your own efficacy and reliability, clarity about priorities, learning to value your own perspective, and reducing distraction. For example, I used to make to-do lists every day of about 15 things I "had" to do, knowing I wasn't going to do them. When you do this everyday, how are you going to make a big life decision? You know you won't carry it out. When I started making to do lists where I indicated a doable number of things that were important, that was a drop in the bucket of "I trust myself". Or in the past, whenever I had a hobby or work task and there was an issue, I tended to just give up, google the answer, sulk, etc. By learning to push through resistance and solve problems myself, I trust myself more and feel less desperate for validation.

I also understood the decisions are typically dynamic rather than static. That is, in the books, it's always about the one historical decisive moment. But in reality, most decisions happen over time as a lot of little decisions, which in the end can be summarized as "should I sit on my ass and give into resistance or should I 'do something'"? The strong sense of value, priority, and loyalty you always read about is something built up over time through many many decisions where you chose to engage and put in the effort and "try", not just something a person can decide to have if they never leave their room alone.