During my fourth and final year of college,

I was guilty of making some fairly bad decisions.

Some of them are unfit to be public and involve cans of spray paint and silly string,

but one of them was about the apartment I shared with my friends.

We had been looking for about two weeks for a new apartment because our current place was starting to show its age and our lease was almost up.

We viewed listing after listing and attended a few open houses until I finally couldn’t take it anymore.

No one could make a decision about anything.

It wasn’t so much that we needed the place,

but I was frustrated and my impatience took over my brain.

I took it upon myself to speed up the process and push a decision.

When it was finally down to two apartments,

I heavily pushed one of the apartments,

and everyone was on board and took my recommendation so they could get back to their busy lives.

At first glance,

this sounds like a story about decisiveness and taking charge,

but it’s really quite the opposite.

One of my roommates had a dog—a little chihuahua named Banana—that was our apartment’s mascot.

Every other apartment we looked at was completely fine with dogs,

but the apartment I chose was most definitely not.

I overlooked this crucial factor in my eagerness to be done with the process.

We contemplated sneaking him in and out of the building for a year but decided it was not in our best interests.

What ended up happening was that I confessed to our future landlord,

and we had to pay an extra one hundred dollars a month.

When I say “we” I mean “I” because I footed the bill on account of it being solely my mistake.

The biggest sin I committed in this decision-making gaffe was assuming that I had all the information.

I was lazy.

I relied upon an assumption and didn’t do the legwork to confirm or deny the assumption.

I also struggled under the burden of making the decision for two other people (and a dog) and felt stress and anxiety from the pending deadline.

It was a perfect storm for me to miss an important detail that cost me over a one thousand dollars.

Decision making isn’t necessarily an art form,

but there are very specific ways that human beings can make incredibly suboptimal decisions without even knowing.