You're the president of your school. You decide to plan a field trip to a zoo in another state. Your Principal warns you that it's too far away, and that the buses won't make it back to school before the end of the day. You don't take his advice. Halfway back from the trip, it's dark outside and the bus runs out of gas. You also forgot about feeding the students for dinner. You wished you had planned better and took your Principal's advice.

In our everyday lives, seeking the opinions of others can help you make a more well-rounded decision that benefits more than one person, but may take away some of you original intentions. Decisions that include more than one person sometimes require a leader to think this way. If people were to go about thinking only of their own opinions, then we would have a selfish world. By looking for others' opinions, we are humbling ourselves and looking at the greater good. Searching for multiple opinions can help someone make a better choice.

As you may know, everyone in this world thinks a little differently on any given subject. No one person can make a perfect decision for the rest of his/her peers. In 2019, a study by Willits University was taken across the country that asked many average Americans what kind of pizza they would exclusively eat for the rest of their lives. According to the data, 20% of Americans said they would eat pepperoni, 10% would eat Meat Lover's, 15% would eat vegetable pizza, 30% would eat cheese, and 25% said they would eat Hawaiian. If one person were to decide the type of pizza everyone else were to eat for the rest of their lives, then at least 70% of people would not get their preferred pizza. It's just not possible to make a decision that benefits everyone using only their own resources. Preferences of others are unclear to just one person. When we look for others' opinions, we find a way to possibly make a lot more people get the outcome they want.

Additionally, looking at the past and present of our government and most businesses, leaders have many advisers to help them make the best outcome decision. Most leaders that hold high positions are powerful, and can make decisions that take thousands, if not millions of dollars. Leaders, like the President, need to make smart decisions that don't lead to negative consequences. Because of this, the President has cabinet members, which act like advisers for him. They help him decide which government organizations and projects to fund, and which not to fund. Generic_Name, one of the President's cabinet members says, "The President has to look at the big picture; he needs to work and find the needs and opinions of the people to solve problems." Leaders have to find an overall decision that benefits many people at once. Government funded public services are built around providing service that benefits many people. In fact, our entire government's structure is designed to shoot down any single-opinion behavior from any one of the three branches of our government by the checks and balances system. If the President's budget plan isn't supportive of a 'need' that congress thinks it is missing, they don't approve it. When leaders seek multiple opinions, they make a choice that supports large amounts of people, not just themself.

Similarly, the strategy of seeking multiple opinions relates to experimentation in science. When taking an experiment, multiple trials are done to eliminate errors and find an average in the data. The individual opinions of others are all slightly different, just like the individual values in data collecting. In decision making there is an outcome decision that is the average of everyone's individual opinions, and in data collection, the result is the average of all the values recorded in the experiment. Generic_Name, a professor in the field of psychology once said in an article, "Because the two [decision making and data collection] are so similar, each individual opinion is like a data point, so any opinion that is off from the others could be considered as an 'error'. When we try to make an average outcome decision, we are essentially eliminating errors, just like in data collection." In psychology, survey and test data is something that psychologists deal with all the time. By eliminating 'errors' and averaging everyone's opinions together, we get a more accurate outcome.

To sum everything up, a better decision is made by seeking multiple opinions from others. By doing this, we are looking at the big picture and are more likely to come up with an overall outcome that benefits everyone . Nobody has the exact same opinion, so nobody can make decisions for everyone else. Leaders of businesses and even the government, like the President, have advisers. The strategy of making an overall opinion even relates to accurate data collection in science. No matter what, the decision almost always has to be a compromise. If we were to go about in our lives only planning by ourselves and thinking selfishly--you may as well be stuck in that bus with no fuel on the side of the highway in the middle of the night.