Make Better Decisions — Live a Better Life
Our life is a collection of the small decisions we make on a daily basis. Making better decisions will lead us to living a better life.
From the moment we wake up in the morning, we begin making decisions. Retired Navy Seal and author of Extreme Ownership, Jocko Willink uses three alarm clocks to wake up, one electric, one battery, and one wind-up, because he believes this is one of the most decisive moments in our day.
This is simply the first decision we make. From there, we proceed to make decision after decision such as what to wear or what we’re going to eat. According to Psychology Today, we make upwards of 35,000 choices per day. This may seem incomprehensible, but it is only possible because we work on autopilot for a majority of them. We have grown to simplify daily tasks by adopting habits which we do without thinking.
Habits are limited in their efficacy though. They work best on repeatable tasks, ones that we have seen a thousand times. However, these aren’t the only tasks we experience on a daily basis. Constantly, we are confronted by new questions and challenges that may be variations of things we have experienced or which we have never seen in our lives. In these moments, we need something stronger than habits to carry us through.
Experience alone can and often do carry us through these moments, but we are limited in our mental capacity each day. Our strength to respond effectively to challenges wanes as the day moves on. These reserves have been compared to a “penny jar.” If we start with 100 pennies in our jar each morning when we wake up, for every decision we make, we take one penny from the jar. By the end of the work day, we have likely used up all our pennies and then return home with a decreased capability. Leaving those we love most with a hollow shell of shortened patience and decreased empathy.
Thus, learning how to save those pennies for the most valuable times, and learning how to simplify our decisions is important to making better decisions and ultimately leading a better life.
Ray Dalio, founder of the hedge fund Bridgewater and author of the book Principles, attributes his success in life more to knowing how to deal with his not knowing than anything he actually knew. This is an interesting idea, but is exactly true because of the complexity of the world we live in.
Sidebar: The show The Good Place humorizes the idea of complexity by making it nearly impossible to get to The Good Place (i.e. Heaven) because even drinking something such as almond milk has so many negative repercussions that even it makes the world a worse place.
Farnam Street takes the idea of principles further to what they call Mental Models which “are how we simplify complexity, why we consider some things more relevant than others, and how we reason.” Charlie Munger said in a talk at USC Business school in 1995 titled A Lesson on Elementary, Worldly Wisdom As It Relates To Investment Management & Business said, “If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form. You’ve got to have models in your head. And you’ve got to array your experience both vicarious and direct on this latticework of models.”
What does this mean? This means that going through life and trying to blindly react to events as they come can lead to demoralizing effects. We must have a way to capture the ideas we read about and study in an actionable, achievable format. Mental models, principles, or decision making processes have this power.
After reading about LeBron James’s detailed pregame routine (aka the Ritual), I became motivated to create habits of my own. One of my favorites being from Jay Shetty’s book Think Like a Monk where he discusses the morning routine TIME which stands for Thankfulness, Insight, Meditation, and Exercise and which I have adapted to my everyday life as well. Habits like these can have massive effects on our mental and physical wellbeing by setting aside specific time for these beneficial activities and for remaining consistent.
This benefit is limited though. No matter how organized my life is, surprises always slip in and throw me off track demanding my attention and energy. To combat this, I am experimenting with the idea of principles and mental models to help reduce the shock factor of the surprises, give me something to lean back on, and save energy for the remainder of the day.
I am taking note and learning from the models listed on Farnam Street and in the book Principles. These offer a great starting off point for creating my own, however the best models and principles must be adapted to our own skills, experiences, and life. That is why I recommend looking more deeply into this idea and seeing how you can fit this into your life because when we can make better decisions, we can inevitably live a better more fulfilling life.
And, just for fun, I’ll leave you with this poem by Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
— Robert Frost
