Emotions are a Bad Way to Make Decisions

Things I’ve learned the hard way

Photo by Tengyart on Unsplash

I am an emotional person. We all are. Yet I’ve had a very low EQ for a lot of my life. Not because I’m not a compassionate person — I am. Not because I don’t care. I do. But I am on the autistic spectrum. It took me a lot longer than most folks to figure out how to manage my emotions.

This has led to me making some seriously bad decisions.

The thing that makes this frustrating — when it comes to universal themes, I can be super objective and always have been. I was a whiz at solving math problems, for example, and engineering problems — pretty much any problem not related to me personally — because I can look at all the components in the right way.

Thanks to my abilities, I had the honor of being the only design engineer in the building whose board design worked right the first time around, no modifications needed. Anyone who has designed boards for a living knows this is not easy to do.

And it wasn’t that my board was easy — in fact, it had a more complex arrangement than many other boards that the company was designing. I had to deal not just with electrical design issues, which is what my degree is in, but also mechanical issues. I worked well with the mechanical engineers, the production engineers, Q.A., etc. When I was focused on my…