Chapter 1: What common decisions do we overthink in daily life?
It feels like we're making more decisions than ever before. Every day it's a constant stream of choices. So let me ask you, how long did you spend deciding on what to wear today, or which email to answer first, or what to order the last time you were at a restaurant? We agonize over these choices like they're life-altering.
But what if many of the decisions that stress us out don't really matter much? That's why today's SYSK Trending Topic is a better approach to decision-making. Today in my conversation with Andy Duke, a recognized decision strategist, we talk about why we overthink small decisions, misjudge big ones, and waste mental energy in all the wrong places.
And we'll explore how to tell the difference between a choice that truly shapes your future and one that just feels important in the moment, but really isn't. And we'll get to it in just a moment. You know, I'm a sucker for a good mystery.
Chapter 2: Why do we struggle with making important life decisions?
Like, in the 1950s, a flight from New York to Minneapolis just disappeared over Lake Michigan. No wreckage, no answers. Or the Dietlof Pass incident, a group of experienced hikers found dead under circumstances so strange people still debate what really happened. There's a podcast called Expedition Unknown from Discovery, hosted by Josh Gates, and this is what he does.
He doesn't just tell these stories. He goes there. He's hunted for priceless artifacts stolen by the Nazis in World War II. He's traced the final flight of a pilot who vanished mid-mission and searched the Great Lakes for a ship that disappeared without a trace. If you love the unanswered questions of history, you know, the stuff that makes you lean in, you're going to love this.
Travel the globe with Josh Gates as he investigates humanity's greatest feats and most iconic legends.
Chapter 3: How can we differentiate between low-impact and high-impact decisions?
Listen to Expedition Unknown wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. It's as if we need a lot of help making decisions and that we're somehow not particularly good at it. And that's why we need all these books and webinars and podcasts. And maybe for those big, important decisions, like who to marry, which house to buy, what job to take, maybe a little help can be beneficial.
But actually, when you think about all the decisions you make every day, and you make a lot of them, you do just fine. And in fact, most of them don't really matter all that much. To understand what I mean and why this is important to you, I want you to meet Annie Duke. She's a speaker and consultant on the topic of decision-making.
She's a former professional poker player, and she is an advocate in the world of decision-making.
Chapter 4: What role does commitment play in decision-making?
She's an advocate for people giving themselves permission to quit things more often. She's the author of a book called How to Decide, Simple Tools for Making Better Choices. Hi, Annie, welcome to Something You Should Know.
Well, thank you for having me, Mike.
So as I said, you could get the sense from all the books about the topic that we're not very good at decision making, that we're terrible at it. Are we terrible at it?
Look, if we were really terrible at making decisions, our species wouldn't exist. The issue that we have is that we have all these ways that we make decisions that work most of the time. They're pretty good. The problem is that there's a whole set of circumstances under which they don't work, which would be true of kind of any rule of thumb.
Chapter 5: How does timing affect our decision-making process?
So there are certain heuristics that we use in order to make decisions. There are biases that we have in the decisions that we make that cause us to make poor decisions under certain and predictable circumstances.
So I remember hearing once, and I always thought this was interesting, that in many cases, it isn't so much what you decide as your commitment to your decision. That whatever you decide, if you commit to it rather than second guess it after the fact, that you'll be a lot happier and content.
Yeah, so it's an interesting trade-off. And B, I think it depends a little bit about what arena we're talking about. I think in general, for things like marriage, which is supposed to be a lifelong commitment, getting married and then immediately starting to second-guess that would be bad for your happiness. I think that's absolutely true.
So you definitely don't want to second-guess things too much. I think that in general, if you go to college and you're constantly second-guessing
Chapter 6: What biases influence our decision-making under uncertainty?
Your choice of college, for example, you're going to be less happy. If you take a job and you're constantly second guessing the job that you take, you're going to be less happy. That being said, there's a flip side to that, which is that we don't want the second guessing to go to zero.
And the reason that we don't want that to go to zero is that when we choose to do something, so let's say we choose to take a job. Remember, I said every decision is a forecast. We're choosing to take the job under conditions where we don't have a lot of information. We've done some interviews.
We've researched the position and the company, talked to a few people who are there, gotten some vibes, and we decide to take the job. But what do we really know about what it's going to be like when we're actually working there? We don't know a whole lot.
Chapter 7: How can seeking external advice improve our decision-making?
So one of the things that we want to think about when we're entering into something is that that decision should not be treated as last and final. It should be the thing that I'm doing now, but I need to think about what are the signals that would tell me that this was a choice that I would prefer to change. Right.
So in other words, we don't want to live a life where the first job we take is the last job that we ever do unless we happen to get fired from the job. We need to realize that we do have the option to quit, to change and go do other jobs. So you need to get a balance between committing to the thing you're doing, but also paying attention to the signals that that job might not be for you.
It seems an important element in decision-making that maybe doesn't get talked a lot about is timing, that you have to make a decision about something, but you also have a time limit because if the time expires, the decision doesn't matter. Some people take a long time to make decisions. Other people make them quickly. What do you think?
Chapter 8: What lessons can we learn from our past decisions?
In general, I think that people decide too slowly. But stepping back from that, every decision is not created equal. And we need to understand what are the types of decisions that we should be taking our time on and what are the types of decisions that we can go pretty fast on. And if we can understand that, we can actually get to a better balance.
So the types of decisions that we can go really fast on are ones where it's okay to make a mistake. And why are those two things connected? Well, because the faster that you make a decision, the more likely you're gonna introduce error into the decision. So when you're making decision that isn't gonna matter much to your happiness in the long run, that's when you should go fast.
So an example would be, and this is something that people often take a lot of time on, is ordering off a menu. So Mike, have you ever, maybe you're somebody like this, or do you know people like this where you go to a restaurant and they're looking at the menu and it just takes them forever to decide what to eat?
Drives me crazy.
Right. Like it's particularly bad if you're, you know, at like the Cheesecake Factory, which I think has like a 20 page menu or something like that. But even if you're at a place with a relatively small menu, people tend to really, really struggle with that decision.
And I think that part of the reason that people struggle with that decision is that pretty quickly after you order, you're going to get whatever it is you ordered and it's either going to be good or bad. And when it's bad, you're going to feel like you made a mistake. So what they're trying to do is to get to the right choice to avoid that feeling of I made a mistake because I don't like my food.
But of course, we have to remember every decision being a forecast that first of all, there's no way for you to know whether your dish is going to be great or bad in advance of getting it. So you're just having you're making your best guess. And if it turns out the chicken is dry, it doesn't mean you made a mistake.
But more importantly, the reason why we shouldn't take a lot of time on that decision is because it doesn't really matter, not in the long run. So Mike, I mean, I can ask you this. Let's say that we go to lunch and you order something and it turns out that you don't like your lunch very much. If I catch you a year later,
after we've had that meal and I say to you, you know, hey, just catching up with you after a year, the last time I saw you was at that lunch a year ago and you didn't really like it very much. How much did that meal affect your happiness over the course of this last year? None. Now, what if I see you a month later and I say, hey, it's been a month since we had that lunch.
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