"The dog ate my homework." "I would love to hear about your recent vacation to the desert." "Oh, you called me last night? I didn't get the message." "Please, tell me more about your grandchildren."

Have you ever lied so that you wouldn't hurt someone's feelings? Chances are you have - maybe a small lie, maybe a big one. A lie about something that doesn't have major negative consequences is often known as a "little white lie."

Many people think of a lie as an action. In reality, however, it's a decision.

Flying By the Seat of Your Pants

White elephants are truly rare, but they may be more trouble than they are worth. In Burmese culture, a white (or albino) elephant is considered sacred. If you own one of these, you are not allowed to put it to work and must spend untold amounts of money and time providing the absolute best care for it. We have all encountered times in our lives when we stop and realize that we're dealing with a white elephant, but we don't always know what we should do about it. When you think you're faced with a white elephant, will you realize it and know what decision to make on what action to pursue?

Have you ever heard of a Hobson's Choice? It is widely misunderstood as a decision between two bad options, but in reality, it's a decision to accept what's offered to you or to pass it by and not accept anything. We've all been faced with this type of decision in our lives take it or leave it.

Don't count your chickens before they hatch. You may have heard this saying before, but you may not know that it's also a good lesson about being cautious and how to approach some decisions. In real life, Aesop's don't count your chickens fable provides us with a lesson about getting ahead of ourselves when approaching decisions. This can happen in all types of decisions, from relationship and personal decisions to professional and career decisions.

Why does a person in California only get .85 of a vote for President in the United States? And why does a person in Alaska get 2 ½ votes? Is this a fair and proper decision-making system for what is perhaps the most important decision made in the United States? So when you go to the polls to vote for the President tomorrow, how much will your vote count? It may be more than your neighbor living in the state next to you or even the house next to you – or it may be less. In fact, it may not count at all.

Don't you hate it when you’re late for work and you encounter someone going slow in the fast lane on the highway? I know I've been caught going slow in the fast lane, causing the guy behind me to become irate and ruthlessly flash his headlights at me to move. I've also been the one doing to flashing when someone in front of me was going much too slow, clearly driving in the wrong lane. While this anecdote obviously applies to driving, it also provides us a metaphor for how we make our decisions and how we live our lives. The lesson that can be learned from this is that you need to live your life in the correct lane and make your decisions accordingly. Sometimes you need to be in the fast lane and other times you need to be in the slow lane. Most of the time, you probably need to be in the middle lane.

Do you take milk in your coffee or cream? Or maybe you like it black? If you're a daily coffee drinker, like me, you face this question every day. Every day in our lives, we face dozens of decisions such as these that we call routine. You may refine the type of coffee you drink or how you take it over time, but you probably don't change every day. That's why we call them routine we've already made the decision ahead of time. They are decisions that are just waiting to be repeated.

Sometimes the choice of one alternative instead of another is not so cut and dry, because you can hedge your bet. You may be facing a decision where you have two options and are likely to either lose something on either choice that you make or gain something on either choice. You may also be facing a decision where you are not sure if you will lose or gain something, but you can't tell which one you'll lose on and which one you'll win on. So what do you do? You hedge your bet.

When it comes to decisions, size matters. Success in business and in your personal life comes from getting the big decisions right, and not dwelling on the small ones. If you make better decisions about your career, your family, your education, your job, etc. than you do on what car you buy or what clothes you wear, you will be on the right track to having a better life.