A Few Bad Decisions
Life is a never ending maze of decisions.
I’d love to make the right decisions all the time. I’d also like to have George Clooney’s charming good looks. Those two outcomes are equally likely.
Instead of obsessing over the right decisions, which is hard, we can simply avoid the worst decisions, which is easy.
Nassim Taleb talks about a concept called via negativa. It’s basically the idea of addition by subtraction. Rather than seeking brilliance, if we simply avoid stupidity, we’ll succeed more often. Taleb argues it’s easier to spot and remove what is wrong than decide and pursue what is right.
Rather than positive action, we can focus on negative action.
In a ping pong match, you could slam a winning shot or you can avoid hitting the ball off the table. Which is easier?
As a golfer I'm focusing less on hitting great shots and more on avoiding terrible shots. My scores are improving.
As an employee, you can strive for exceptional performance, which is hard. Or you can remove poor performance—showing up late, complaining, turning in work with errors, missing deadlines—which is easy.
If we can always avoid the biggest mistakes, we’ll generally stay on the right path. Then we can focus on making more good decisions, more often.
But let’s start here. These are a few bad decisions we’d all do well to avoid:
Excessive drinking. Pat Tillman had a rule about drinking: you can drink as much as you want, but you can never let a hangover ruin the next day.
I can’t count the days I lost to hangovers in my early twenties. None of them were worth the fun I had the night before. There’s nothing wrong with drinking, but drinking to the point of ruining the next day is an enormous waste. It’s bad for your body, and it kills your productivity.
Being fat. This might sound harsh, but there are no benefits to being overweight. Obesity impacts sleep, comfort, ability to do daily activities from climbing stairs to chasing children, and it puts you at much higher risk for deadly diseases. If you can avoid being fat, your life will be much easier and more enjoyable.
Crazy college debt. With a few exceptions—mostly medical and engineering professions—racking up six figures of debt for college is a bad decision. In most cases, you can find a comparable education for much less money.
Paying for a top dollar education to become a high school teacher is like going through Navy SEAL training to become a mall cop—foolish and unnecessary. And beginning adult life with mortgage sized debt is like trying to play basketball while wearing a weight vest—a game changing handicap. Don’t get me wrong, education is always good, but often the costs outweigh the benefits.
Rooting your identity in a dogma. For example, “I’m a Christian,” or “I’m a liberal.” Read this carefully. I’m not saying it’s bad to hold these beliefs. I’m saying it’s bad to make these beliefs your identity.
When your beliefs become who you are, you can’t look at situations objectively and easily change your mind. Changing your identity is much harder than changing your mind, so don’t make those two things inextricably linked. Here are a few examples:
If you label yourself as a liberal, you’ll feel like a fraud voting for anyone else, even if you think you should. If you label yourself as an open minded person who tends to hold liberal beliefs, you’ll be open to voting for a moderate or a conservative if it makes sense to you.
If you label yourself as a 2nd Amendment supporter, you’ll feel like a fraud disagreeing with reasonable gun control laws. If you label yourself as a reasonable person who tends to be pro-gun, you’ll be open to supporting reasonable gun control laws, like universal background checks.
Spending more than you earn. I don’t care how you save, spend, and invest your money. I have thoughts on how people should do this, but I’m not delusional enough to think they should be universal. What is universal is the fact that consistently spending more than you earn will negatively impact your life. Best case, you pay more for things than you should because of interest. Worst case, you experience the stress of unnecessary debt, feel the impacts of a bad credit score, and bear the burden of financial strain on your relationships.
Accidental pregnancies. These are like tattoos, except worse—a permanent reminder of a temporary feeling. Permanently linking yourself to a person you don’t want to be permanently linked with will drastically alter the outcome of your life—likely not in a good way. To be clear, I’m talking about the other parent, not the child. But having a child when you weren’t ready for one will severely limit your potential.
These are the most important examples in my mind, but this is less about the specifics and more about the mindset.
You don’t have to hit home runs. You just have to avoid striking out, yelling at the umpire, and getting thrown out of the game. Where are you making bad decisions in your life, and how can you eliminate them?
Answer that question, and your potential is limitless.
Photo by Dave Hoefler on Unsplash
