How to Choose (Part 3)
Your talent is your choice
This post is part of a miniseries. Part 1 can be found here, and Part 2 can be found here.
Suddenly you flare in my sight, a wild rose blooming at the edge of thicket, grace and light where yesterday was only shade, and once more I am blessed, choosing again what I chose before. –Wendell Berry, "The Wild Rose"
Let’s recap. In the first post of this miniseries, I laid out three paradoxical principles in decision-making:
Big choices are not hard choices.
Hard choices are easy choices.
Good choices feel bad.
These principles form the basis of a framework for better decision-making across a variety of situations:
Big, easy choices should be maximized—i.e., made analytically and systematically, by aggregating independent judgments.
Small, hard choices should be satisficed—i.e., made quickly and definitively, with a heavy reliance on visualization and intuition.
Big, hard choices (and small, easy ones) should be “maxi-ficed”—i.e., made by applying analysis first, and deferring intuition until the end.
In this, the third and final post of the series, I want to focus on this third bullet and zoom in on a deceptively difficult question: What do we stand to gain by making big, hard decisions? (Or more bluntly: Why choose?)
The False Promise of Passivity
The root of the word decide can be translated as “to cut off”—as in cutting off options or possibilities.
This meaning gets at the heart of why choices—especially big, hard choices—are a source of such doubt and rumination: We sense, correctly, that the decisions we make are altering our life trajectories irreversibly; yet we are keenly aware of the fact that we rarely have all the information we need to make them, and may not even be able to fully articulate what it is we want.
For this reason, many of us are tempted to go with the option that feels like “not choosing,” telling ourselves that if we go with the default or status quo, we won’t be to blame if we end up dissatisfied with the outcome. Of course this is a load of crap. In practice, not quitting is choosing your current job, not breaking up is choosing to stay together, and not swerving is choosing to run over the puppy that just ran into the street.
The truth is, most of us are systematically risk averse when it comes to deviating from the path we’re on. In one modern classic of this research literature, economist Steve Levitt offered convincing evidence to this end: In his study, a coin was flipped to randomly assign would-be deciders to either make a change or stick with what they had; six months later, those who made the change reported greater satisfaction with their decisions.
The results of this study and others like it point to a stark conclusion: If you feel 50-50 on whether to make a change, it’s likely you should already have made it. After all, our bias toward inaction (or, really, the illusion of “inaction”) may have served a sensible evolutionary purpose in an environment where uncertainty threatened survival; but in a safer modern environment, uncertainty need not disqualify an option so long as that option presents more upside than downside.
To make this more concrete, an option that has a chance of being good usually trumps a shitty status quo. People “stuck” in a bad job or relationship often talk themselves out of leaving because they don’t know what will happen if they take the leap. But the self-delusion dissipates when you face two simple facts: a) sticking with the default is in fact a choice; and b) a situation that might be good or might be bad is clearly better in expectation than one you know is bad.1
Doors and Faucets
The argument above is what you might call the “negative case” for making big, hard choices—namely that it is irrational and unstrategic to avoid them.
But there is also a “positive case” for making these decisions—one rooted in a sense of excitement and personal growth. Rather than orienting itself around the options our decisions are cutting off, this persepctive emphasizes the affirmative vision our choices are committing us TO.
Ruth Chang—whose ideas serve as one of the core inspirations behind this series—has a cutesy acronym for how to make big, hard decisions: AUTHOR.2 By following her six steps, Chang says, each of us can use our choices to write our own story. I like the sentiment but frankly find her acronym too hard to remember, so I’m shamelessly stealing her last two steps to form a new one, DOOR:
Define the criteria.
Optimize all sub-decisions.
Open yourself to commitment.
Remake/realize yourself.
These four steps are, in a nutshell, the key to maxi-ficing a big, hard decision (or a small, easy one): The first two letters are a shorthand for maximizing; the last two are a shorthand for satisficing.3 I won’t rehash everything I wrote in Part 2 here, but I’d like to elaborate on just a couple points.
First, consider the second step (Optimize all sub-decisions) and in particular the difference between the words “maximize” and “optimize”; I’m using the latter here not only because it makes my acronym work better but also because of a shade of difference in meaning. Though used interchangeably in many contexts, “maximizing” has at its root the idea of getting the most out of your choice (say, the highest-paying job with the greatest amount of prestige, meaning, flexibility, etc.) whereas “optimizing,” by contrast, suggests doing the best (say, by making your choice as efficiently and effectively as possible). Simply put, maximizing is about outcomes, while optimizing is about process. And even when you use the optimal process (repeat after me: aggregate independent judgments), you may not get the maximally desirable outcome.4
Now consider the last step: Remake/realize yourself. The point here is that when, in the course of satisficing, we open ourselves to commitment and visualize possible futures this isn’t just an exercise to help us identify what we truly want. (It is that, but it’s also something more.) When we affirmatively choose one vision over another, we help make that vision a reality. In deciding to live in the suburbs over the city, or take a pay cut in exchange for greater flexibility, or order in instead of cooking dinner, we in fact become the kind of person who prefers the suburbs, or wants control over their schedule, or eats a full container of pad thai—whatever this means in reference to our values. We refashion ourselves—incrementally or all at once—in the image of our choice.
For this reason—cutesy acronyms notwithstanding—the door analogy may actually be a bit misleading despite its ubiquity. Instead, try this alternative metaphor my partner was offered in her first year of law school: Available options are not doors but faucets; keep too many of them open, and no single spigot can retain its water pressure.
I like the faucet analogy because it brings together the negative and positive case for making big, hard choices. While there is often some wisdom in preserving optionality, it’s a fallacy to believe that you can succeed by “not choosing” at all; and when you do focus your energy—not monomaniacally, but within a narrower set of priorities—you both clarify your values and generate momentum for them.
You Are Your Choices
The actress and teacher Stella Adler famously said, “Your talent is in your choice.” I’d go a step further and put it this way: Your talent is in the choice you make over and over.
If we look at the lives of those we admire, I think we’ll find that our awe is rarely for one heroic act or brilliant flash of insight. True, there may be a climactic moment or two we can point to. But these scenes are inspiring not because they are especially rare or dramatic but because they are defining: We love such decisions because they reveal something essential about the person’s character; the signature mode by which they move through the world; the totality and consistency of their choosing.
Paradoxically, then, our most important choices may be the ones that are so habitual they barely register as choices at all. These are the decisions which compound and ripen through the years into fruits beyond our wildest dreams. Like a fractal, they take a form which appears and reappears at every scale of our lives—the everyday slog and the grand design. They shape us who we must become, these choices we can’t stop making.
To give a salient example of this fallacy in recent history: The core argument for President Biden dropping out of the race was not because this would guarantee a stronger showing by the Democratic party. (Indeed, Biden’s supporters were correct to raise the risk of disarray and infighting.) Rather, there was strong evidence that Biden had no path to victory, and a gamble with high upside is preferable to a near-certain loss.
AUTHOR stands for: Ascertain what matters in the choice; Understand the pros and cons; Tally pros and cons; Home in on the fact that you are making a hard choice; Open yourself up to the possibility of making a commitment; Remake/realize yourself as someone who has committed to the choice.
Another nice feature of DOOR: It is split into the words “Do” and “Or”—each of which gestures toward a key feature of big, hard choices (and a way those choices can go astray): “Do” is the generic verb of action; “Or” speaks to the presence of alternatives; and to make maxi-fice effectively we need to both a) grapple seriously with what each of the alternatives offers and b) be ready to actually act on one of them. (Note that the DO part of the DOOR acronym is actually the two steps about weighing alternatives and the OR part is the two steps about committing to a course of action, so word meanings don’t map as nicely as they ideally would.)
The research literature mostly refers to maximizers rather than optimizers. I suspect this is just a fact downstream of whoever coined the term. Nevertheless, the distinction between outcome and process is useful: The most miserable maximizers of all are probably those fixated on getting the most desirable outcome but not actually using any of the best practices for achieving it.