I was watching a video on how Bonsai masters grow their trees for over a decade before they are ready to be sold to a customer when one of the required skills in the craft got me thinking.

Like any other tree, Bonsai takes time to grow, and the beauty and monetary value of a tree, sometimes over $900,000, heavily lies in its final shape.

This being a patient and heavy-stakes process means that the master has to rely on their intuition and experience when they start shaping the tree during its infant years.

A small mistake that seems harmless now can slowly snowball into a mess, rendering the tree not worth its full value after years of care and effort, or even killing it.

Every cut and twist has to be visualised and measured.

While we might not be growing Bonsai in our backyard, this skill does come in handy in our day-to-day decision-making.

We often make decisions in haste because we either don't have time to deliberate or are simply not that interested in the task and want to get it over with as soon as possible.

This is where many decisions turn sour because we don't invest enough time and effort to see the long-term implications of our decisions.

What if, like a Bonsai master, we carefully evaluate the long-term repercussions of our decisions before we make the call?

We could rely on our past knowledge, experiences and years of intuition to guide us into visualising how a decision might impact us 4, 5 or 8 years from now.

Will we be happy with the outcome of what we decide today, a decade later? Or are our decisions a stopgap solution to a problem today but will probably rattle our foundation 5 years from now?

Think about it the next time you have to decide on something more complex than choosing what to wear in the morning or ordering takeout. It's worth the extra time investment now to save yourself from a big mess afterwards.

Now, before you move on to the rest of this newsletter issue, here are a few words from: