The Hardest Decisions of All
November 19th, 2007When most people think of decision making, they are thinking of either business decisions like How to Compete Against Big Business or Motivating Employees and personal consumption decisions like Buying or Renting, Converting Your Car to Grease Fuel or How to Fight Advertising.
This is probably because these decisions are the easier decisions to make.
We really have no basis for how to go about making the harder decisions. Decisions about whether to leave an abusive spouse, or whether to find a new job if your old one is just ok, or what to do with your life, are much more difficult and messy.
The hardest decisions are ones between a mediocre or negative status quo and a change that would probably be positive, but requires a more negative hump to get over first.
In changing jobs, usually we stick with an unhappy situation far beyond what we would be willing to enter into. Getting a new job has quite a hump, and involves a lot of time, effort, and anxiety, so we are willing to put up with a lot.
In abusive relationships, and not just romantic relationships, but friendships, teacher-student relationships, family, etc… it can seem a lot easier to put up with a negative situation than to face the hump, largely emotional in this case, of speaking to the person and breaking off the relationship (or trying to change it). With relationships there is always the hope that next time it will be better.
The cost of change looks something like this:
(don’t laugh at my poor artwork)
These are the decisions we agonize over and are completely unsure of. They are also hard to make stick because we tend to be unsure about them in the beginning, but become more unsure as the cost of the hump begins to be felt, and we may try to back out.
They are also where we need the most help.
One of my favorite thoughts from Steve Pavlina is that we should not accept situations that we’d rate as mediocre to slightly positive. If we’d rate a situation 6 or 7 out of 10, then we should change it. The problem is that we tend to get complacent with situations that are mediocre, and never get to a situation we’d rate as a 10.
The real problem though is, as always, one of information. We might rate a current job at a 6 or 7, but who’s to say that it’s not actually a 9 and we just have unrealistic hopes for what a job should be? If our relationship is a 6 or 7 is that because of the relationship or because of years seeing media telling us what it should be?
In essence, how do we really know what the limit of possibilities is if we haven’t experienced it? Would we recognize it even if we did?
It reminds me of this question:
If you could have the best sex of your life tonight, knowing that for the rest of your life you’d be comparing every night to this night, would you do it?
We have a hard enough time dealing with decisions when we are facing uncertainty about our choices. In the messy world of personal decisions that have major impacts on our material and emotional lives, the cost hump involved with making changes makes these decisions even more difficult. How do we approach them? What is the right answer? Is there even a right answer?
-zot
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November 20th, 2007 at 7:03 am
Good post Zot. Ineretia and fuzzy perception contribute to people remaining in negative or mediocre situations.
Self perception also contributes to the problem. If one does not work on changing the “internal” circumstances as well, often they recreate the original negative circumstances in a new job, relationship, etc. Thus the effort to change is largely wasted because only the external geography changed, not the inner connections to the problem.
David Emerald wrote “The Power of TED” elucidating the diference between being a creator and a victim.
I’ve found the book very useful personally and with clients. (Link below. I’ve met David, but will only recieve a smile and a thank you for this link, no other benefits.)
Your blog is a good read Zot. Keep it up.
Bob
http://powerofted.com/main/
November 20th, 2007 at 7:10 am
Zot wrote >>>In essence, how do we really know what the limit of possibilities is if we haven’t experienced it? Would we recognize it even if we did?
It reminds me of this question:
If you could have the best sex of your life tonight, knowing that for the rest of your life you’d be comparing every night to this night, would you do it?
November 20th, 2007 at 7:12 am
Not sure what happened that this post got cut in two,,,,
but sure! Go for it!!
“best” in the quote is not an absolute unless you qut trying to go deeper into yourself, your partner and your relationship.
November 29th, 2007 at 3:43 pm
Yes, I think the evidence is that we are not that great at predicting (or remembering) what will make us happy in the future (according to Harvard Prof. Dan Glibert “Stumbling on Happiness”).
It seems like in choosing a job that makes us happy, we want to know how happy other jobs will make us (compared to our current one). We need a sample to compare our current experience too. Maybe this is the case in relationships too. How does the current relations make you feel compared to past ones? (note that we are probably misremembering–maybe journals are better). It seems like in all these decisions (jobs, relationships, locations, etc…) that you need to experience an appropriate sample to grasp the range you are dealing with (set the low end and high end). You essentially create the metric by which to measure future experiences (not very romantic I know). And there are lots of reasons why this strategy might not lead to a “good” decision–I’m thinking of your maximizer vs saticficer post.
So here is a potential question for a future decision making post: how do we decide who we will have romantic relationships with? Is it a choice? What parts of it just happen (like attraction)?