Avoid analysis paralysis. Don’t let an insatiable appetite for more, better data prevent you from making decisions at all.
We’ve made it folks; we now live in the era of big data. But is smart technology making us dumb? It’s a question that many smart people have asked and discussed at length.
Analysis paralysis is an easy trap to fall into anytime there’s uncertainty, especially when (1) there is lots of available information; (2) there are lots of choices; and/or (3) the decision will have lasting consequences.
Yes, your brain is wired to initiate your actions before you’re aware of them. After all, in everyday life, you do many things by choice, right? At least it seems that way. But the brain is a predicting organ. It launches your next set of actions based on your past experience and current situation, and it does so outside of your awareness. In other words, your actions are under the control of your memory and your environment. Does this mean you have no free will? Who’s responsible for your actions?
The predictions that initiate your actions don’t appear out of nowhere. Your brain predicts and prepares your actions using your past experiences. If you could magically reach back in time and change your past, your brain would predict differently today, and you might act differently and experience the world differently as a result.
It’s impossible to change your past, but right now, with some effort, you can change how your brain will predict in the future. You can invest a little time and energy to learn new ideas. You can curate new experiences. You can try new activities. Everything you learn today seeds your brain to predict differently tomorrow.
We tend to believe that the COSTS of doing/not doing something stay the same over time.
This, again, is false.
The longer you do nothing, the more expensive any decision becomes. Therefore, for many hard decisions, the longer you wait the worse your reality can become, and the higher the cost of making moves in the future.
Most of us assume that not only does doing nothing have no cost, but that if we do nothing, everything will stay the same over time. Or better yet, things will magically work themselves out and improve on their own.
If we don’t have that tough conversation or go to therapy or take a career advancement course, then our relationship and our career will stay exactly the same or might even get better on their own. This rarely happens.
Belief: Things only change when we make decisions to change them. Things don’t change when we do nothing.
This is false.
In short, doing nothing doesn’t mean things stay the same. Doing nothing can make things worse.
When faced with a decision of whether or not to do a ‘hard’ thing, most of us perform a cost analysis. We ask ourselves how much money/time/emotional discomfort will this thing cost us?
Many times, we treat the decision to DO something as the only decision that needs to be made.
But there are always two decisions at play:
Decision 1: Do X
Decision 2: Don’t do X
And they each have a cost. Yet, we often only focus on the cost of doing something and ignore the (sometimes) higher cost of doing NOTHING.
That’s not all.
The interesting thing is how these costs change over time. For this, we need to examine our thoughts/beliefs about the status quo, and about doing nothing.
Jonathan Baron, a Psychologist, puts it: “thinking is negative utility!” … which is a fancy way of saying: decisiveness is important.
Decisions in the real world are often time-sensitive — the sooner you act, the more value you realize from having acted. In other words, how quickly you act after coming to a decision is just as important as how you come to said decision.
In theory, the most difficult challenge in decision-making is making the right decision. In practice, the most difficult challenge in decision-making is executing a decision you do not want to do. Being effective calls for us to act decisively on decisions that we do not like. This is common sense. And yet it remains amongst the hardest things we do.
Effective individuals have slightly better decision-making methods in their heads, and they use thinking tools that are more effective at getting to their goals. But these tools aren’t enough to explain their effectiveness. Effective individuals are usually effective because a) they are biased towards action, and b) they have the stomach to do what the rest of us might not.
Excellence is mundane. Excellence is accomplished through the doing of actions, ordinary in themselves, performed consistently and carefully, habitualized, compounded together, added up over time. While these actions are “qualitatively different” from those of performers at other levels, these differences are neither unmanageable nor, taken one step at a time, terribly difficult.
Every time a decision comes up, the qualitatively “correct” choice will be made. The action, in itself, is nothing special; the care and consistency with which it is made are.
We ought not to view it as something special, as depraved, or in some magical way better than other kinds of behavior. We ought to see it simply as a kind of behavior some disapprove of and others value, studying the processes by which either or both perspectives are built up and maintained.
When the ant walked with rice, it stumbled across a grain of lentils on the way. And the ant can not carry both in one go. It will have to carry one of those grain along and leave the other one there.
Kabir Das was a 15th-century Indian mystic poet and saint, whose writings influenced Hinduism's Bhakti movement and his 2 line verses are found still useful in the fundamentals of life today.
In life, many moments come, when we are greedy to have more than one grain, at a given time. But in most of those moments we can not and should not try to carry boh with us. Accept one and leave the other.
This is the question that allowed Ben Hunt-Davis and the British Olympic rowing team to win a gold medal at the Sydney Olympics in 2000, which was the first time a British crew won this event since 1912. The question was applied as a basic stress test to whatever decision the team made in their training leading up to the games. For instance:
“Will practicing rowing today make the boat go faster?” Yes. So, do it.
“Will following a strict diet that boosts energy, maintains muscle mass, and minimizes fat gain make the boat go faster?” Yes. So, do it.
“Will going out on Friday night to get wasted make the boat go faster?” Probably not, unfortunately. So, don’t do it. It’s a simple question that focuses us on the goals that we are trying to achieve, and then aligns every decision, big or small, in life to get them closer to the goals, in an almost robotic, uncompromising way, leaving no room for excuses or poor judgment.
This type of discipline can be practiced. It may not be easy or intuitive at first, but having this kind of perpetual compass to guide your every move will help you at least objectively see whether an action will get you closer to or further away from your goal. The final call is still yours, but more often than not, just being aware of the ultimate objective is incentive enough to stay on track.
When Hernán Cortés and 600 men arrived in Mexico in 1519, after a long and treacherous voyage across the Atlantic, he gave a rather interesting order.
Burn the boats.
Burning the boats was also a major strategy in Sun Tzu’s ancient military treatise, “The Art of War”.
From the Greeks, to Asia, to Imperial Spain, the strategy of ‘burning the boats’ has been seen throughout history. Why?
How could intentionally destroying your own resources on the eve of battle serve as a strategy for victory?
The “burn the boats” strategy — that is, making failure to achieve a desired outcome more painful — is an effective way to ensure victory because it eliminates an important obstacle to accomplishing your goals.
That obstacle is a thought. The thought that if ‘things don’t work out’ you always have an escape plan to fall back on. Knowing you have an escape plan will prevent you from giving every ounce of effort needed for victory.
When you burn the boats you are also igniting a burning desire to succeed. You have no choice. You win or you perish.
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