I missed my flight... so now we're on holiday
The topic of decision making has come up a lot during client sessions lately. Most guys procrastinate and get indecisive because deep down they don't trust themselves. They're scared of making the 'wrong' decision - of making a 'mistake'. But I've learned something powerful over the years; there are no bad decisions. There are only bad reactions to decisions. In this case, we decided not to double-check our flight times, and as a result turned up to the airport about 24 hours too late to make an expensive flight from NZ to Czech. To add injury to insult, the war in Iran has ruined most flight routes back home, and the ones remaining are highly sought after. We tried booking new flights, but they got sold out by the time we got to the check out page. It was looking nearly impossible to get home within the next few weeks, and we had important medical appointments etc coming up. What to do? Well, it turns out we were looking at it the wrong way. We looked at it as a mistake that needed fixing. This limited our vision to only looking for flights all the way back to Czech, i.e. to redo what we originally were supposed to do. But what if we changed it? What if we treated this as an opportunity to go travelling? Turns out, there's only strong competition for flights going direct from NZ all the way to Europe. Flights just to midway points, like Singapore and Hawaii, were going ahead as normal with the usual availability. So it turned out to be much easier and cheaper to separate the trip into 2 stages; one to a midway point and then a separate ticket from there back home. Long story short, we realised we could spend a week in Hawaii and then cruise onwards to Czech without having to fly through a warzone or compete for tickets. Sure, it cost money, but was actually pretty cheap because we're booking it all last-minute, so both flights and accomodation were lower than usual. Probably the better way to travel anyway. And then, to further overcome the regret of 'missing our flight' and 'wasting money', we decided that one day in the future we would have done a Hawaii trip anyway, so technically-speaking we're just bringing it forward. In this sense, we haven't actually lost any money! We're just travelling one-way from NZ rather than a more expensive return trip from Czech.