Did you ever think about the important roll bad decisions play in how to succeed in life and how to succeed in business?

I'm being deadly serious about this because whether you realize it or not, your decisions, especially the bad ones, are so important to your success.

Although poor decisions play a critical role in anybody's life, very few people realize it or even think about it. Most people look to sweep their lousy decisions under the rug or otherwise pretend that they never even happened. What a huge mistake this is.

Not recognizing a bad decision is to miss out on a huge opportunity for self improvement. Every decision – whether it turns out to be good or bad – provides an outcome. Good outcomes result in good, positive feelings and there is certainly nothing wrong with that. Less than favorable outcomes on the other hand provide us with something far more important.

Making hundreds of decisions throughout the day is a part of life. Most are small, seemingly insignificant decisions like what to have for lunch while others hold a great deal more importance. You've got to understand, everybody is the sum total of the decisions they make. The small decisions and the big ones; we are a reflection of our choices.

Let's look specifically at only the bad decisions we make. The truth of life is that learning how to succeed in business or how to succeed in life in general would be impossible without the benefit of bad decisions. Making bad decisions provides us with experience and experience eventually leads us to success.

You should fully expect to make an occasional bad decision but I will even go as far as to say that you should embrace all the bad decisions you will certainly make.

So when you do make those inevitable bad decisions, be easy on yourself. Understand that there was a good reason why you make the decisions you make so accept whatever the outcome might be. Most importantly you've got to learn your lessons. There is nothing wrong with making a bad decision and learning from it. On the other hand there is everything wrong with making a bad decision without taking a good lesson from the experience.

Do not let your bad decisions go to waste.

As an example, look at the child who touches a hot stove. Obviously touching a hot stove is clearly a bad decision. However at the same time a crucial lesson was learned. That child learned her lesson and she won’t be touching anymore hot stoves any time soon.

Of course, one should always look to make good decisions and I think that goes without saying. Nobody ever wakes up in the morning eager to make poor decisions. But, as fallible human beings, it is absolutely impossible to avoid them.

Also, on a lighter note, bad decisions make for good stories, agreed? I can absolutely guarantee you that something which appears to be a bad decision with a seemingly dire outcome today will not seem so bad tomorrow.