Why Good Decision Making Matters?
And why you must get great at it?
It’s a lovely day and I invite you to assess all the accomplishments in your life i.e. profession, money, marriage, friends, travels, and umpteen other memories. This sure feels good and calls for a pat on your own back for surviving and thriving all these years.
Now, let’s evaluate this same scenario from a different perspective.
Go back 10 years and ask yourself if you knew that you would be doing exactly what you are doing today.
Or go back to 5 years pre-marriage and assess if you knew who you would get married to?
Or go back to school days and think about the subjects you were focused on, and what you actually mastered in times to come - were they precisely the same?
If no is the answer then you would realize that the future was uncertain then, as it is today. Just like you had no idea earlier about what will unfold in your professional career, academic interests, or love life - the same is applicable today. Though the future looks more uncertain than the past, it is as uncertain as it has ever been.
But, we as a species, still obsess over forecasting how things will pan out. How high will the US take the interest rates? When will Russia stop the war? When will China attack Taiwan? When will you make your 1st million?
There are no clear answers to these questions and even if you attempted, you could merely spin stories in your head and feel that you accomplished lots of work and had a productive day - but let me remind you, it's just a story that gives you comfort and some semblance of certainty about the future.
As Morgan Housel says “Certainty is so valuable that we’ll never give up the quest for it, and most people couldn’t get out of bed in the morning if they were honest about how uncertain the future is.”
So what am I hinting at?
There is great merit in the advice to stop delving into the outcomes that are not in our control. And almost nothing is, except for the choices we make in the moment right now. And if that’s what we can influence, then we ought to get great at it, leaving the rest to providence or serendipity to decide upon our share of good luck and fortune.
Let me explain with an example.
It’s 11 pm, you are tired, your eyes are hurting and you have an early trip to meet a client. The choices you have are:
Call it a day and go to sleep
Finish the movie you started watching an hour back on Netflix
Drink one more peg of whisky
Which of these is a good decision? For now, this decision is all that matters. As insignificant as evening this sounds, the consistency of the mindset that you will exercise in this situation could decide the entirety of your future ahead. It’s not about the next 2 hrs that you may spend watching the remainder of the movie, it’s about you building an ability to look at options and assessing which one serves you well.
Choice # 1
Calling it a day and going to sleep would seem like the best option, ONLY and ONLY IF, you had clarity of purpose and the awareness of the role that tomorrow’s work plays in fulfilling that purpose. If getting a good night's sleep allows your brain to work better and zip faster, then optimizing for that would be your go-to option. If showing up on time matters to you and getting organized well in time primes your productivity, then aiming for that would make this option a no-brainer.
This particular option has got nothing to do with the outcome of the meeting with the client. It’s solely focused on creating an environment or getting into the mental zone inside of which you operate better, which indirectly leads to higher odds of a better outcome. That’s all there will ever be, odds to better outcomes. That’s all you can influence. And hence you must.
Choice # 2
Finishing the movie on Netflix is a juicy proposition, especially if the movie is exciting and laced with a nail-biting twist or edge-of-the-seat thrills. This reminds me of some of the amazing movies I’ve seen lately - Kantaara, RRR, KGF, Avatar: Way of Water, Top Gun Maverick, and there are a few more.
But did you factor in the 2-3 hrs required to finish the movie? Did you take into account the movie digging into your sleep time? Were you present to your own energy levels to appreciate the movie and sit through the whole duration with rapt attention?
If you dissect the questions above, these hint at one’s own ability to assess one’s own energy levels, and awareness of how one decision eats into the other task(s) at hand.
This process may be a 10-second analysis in your mind and hence would seem absolutely trivial in substance. But it’s not. Many choices in life come down to these 10 seconds of thinking. And getting good at this becomes about clarity of purpose again. I loved how James Clear defined it in his interview with Tim Ferriss -
“ What are you optimizing for?”
My parents were in town till 17th Jan and I was purely optimizing for pampering them and making sure they go back with tonnes of memories. I normally sleep by 8:30 pm and wake up by 3:30 am, followed by my routine cold shower, meditation, reading, and gym session before I reach work at 8 am. But I haven’t followed this protocol since 19th Dec.
I was sleeping between 11 pm and 1 am almost daily, waking up around 6-7 am, heading to work, and trying to slot in a workout or two max in the whole week, post my working hours. My meditation, reading, and stock analysis were thrown out of the window for these 4 weeks. And I was absolutely at peace with that since I was optimizing for my parent’s happiness.
A lot of decision-making comes down to clarity of purpose and how one's actions feed into this purpose that you are optimizing for.
But if you chose to watch the movie only to kill time, then even having a good time will become elusive, since the purpose is killing time, not enjoying the free time. If you were optimizing for having a good time, then you would like to watch a movie that you're enjoying watching, and the moment it's not fun, you shouldn’t mind switching it off and calling it a day.
The same logic applies to reading a book too. It's been wrongly drilled into our minds that we have to complete every book we read or complete every movie we watch. Quitting has got such a bad rap that we even subconsciously struggle to quit on bad stuff eg. movies, books, or games. Our inability to quit freely even makes many struggle with quitting on bad friendships, stressful jobs, or toxic relationships.
It’s time you build a new relationship with ‘quitting’ upon things or people when it’s needed. Many a time, quitting is the best decision you will make.
Choice # 3
Nothing wrong with another glass of your preferred drink IF you can handle it well. Nothing wrong with it if you have close friends or family at home and you are optimizing for a good time out. Nothing wrong with it if it's not a routine affair.
The million-dollar question is whether you can tap into this reasoning before making another drink. For many, it's the pleasure they seek that makes them gulp one drink after another. The dopamine hit that comes from consuming your favorite elixir cannot be matched by anything, especially at night, when your brain is in retirement mode and doesn’t have the willpower to put up defenses of any kind.
And hence one would need to create structures or rules of engagement, which can be mutually agreed upon with your partner, and even enforced with persuasion if needed. Now this calls for some level of maturity on the part of all involved in this implicit contract.
In my case, my wife made me promise to never drink alone while at home. I resisted mentally while keeping this promise but was committed to cutting out drinking from my life. I must admit that having an iron-willed wife helps too.
This simple promise has single-handedly cut off 90% of my alcohol consumption and even brought me to a place where one glass of red wine or max two in a month would be my ideal pattern of consumption as of today. This has been great for my health, even better for getting a good night’s sleep, and facilitated my early to rise habit and the morning protocol that follows.
There is magic in creating structures that could help you reach your desired goals. These structures could be in the form of a partner, a trainer, a friend, a financial penalty for every lapse on your side, or an accountability coach - there are many roads that could lead to creating a structure. What matters is that you walk on one of these paths, since depending on willpower and self-motivation have only a fleeting influence on us.
Why do you think that most people’s resolutions from 1st Jan will be forgotten before January even finishes? The primary reason is that the resolution is still being executed by the same person with no change in the mindset, or the structure, or the environment inside which the person functions.
As James Clear also states in his book "You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems."
In summary, actions are preceded by a line of reasoning, which is preceded by the clarity of purpose, which is preceded by the time invested to think deeply, which is preceded by the people in your life that influence or inspire you, that is preceded by the curiosity and ambition that fuels you.
Every action has its source in your thinking process and being aware of this process, and working on it consciously is the best of all good decisions that you will ever make.
Journaling is a good starting point to develop a habit of thinking through. Having an accountability coach is even better. Being in a relationship with someone who could keep you in line is icing on the cake.
Irrespective of the path you take, getting good at decision-making isn’t a choice you get to be casual about.
You must ace this come what may !!!