Making Decisions

Sometimes people feel unable to make decisions. The solution is frighteningly simple, so much so that one perhaps recoils upon first hearing.

The first insight is that decisions must be goal-based. The second is that goals must be measurable. For example, “to be happy” is not a goal because it is not clear when that is achieved. How many minutes of happiness qualifies as an achievement of happiness? Instead, choose one of the conditions for being happy, like “getting a snack.” That might sound whimsical, but the more you fight this schema, the more you see that the fight is all you have.

Not all goals are equal. Some have priority over others. This requires some thought. Leave no two goals equal. If you have two that seem equal, look at their subgoals. Here, you’ll find that you do indeed have preferences.

In the end, you’ll find that you have a hierarchy of goals. There is a single goal at the top, with a handful of subgoals directly beneath it. Each of these have subgoals, until you reach the level of making decisions about minute-to-minute choices. Of course, it is not reasonable to work out the entire tree explicitly, but you must have the intuition that there is one, or that there ought to be one, and that articulating it is what is going to resolve any decision-quandary you might find yourself in. In other words, instead of asking yourself about the relative benefits and costs of a particular decision, you see where the benefits lie in your tree. Do the costs undermine goals that have higher priority than the benefits?

The last insight is that the cultivation of mental wealth must be the top priority. Here is the reason: No good decisions are made possible by lack of lucidity or awareness. To make good decisions, you must have a good decision-making mechanism, therefore the cultivation of that ability overrides any other decision. It is closed-loop logic that propels mental wealth to the top of your hierarchy.

Mental wealth isn’t like being happy; it is clear when you have it and when you are using it; most importantly, the issue of cultivation is very clear. It is the cultivation (and not the state) that ought to be the priority, since you might need to pass through some difficult bottlenecks to get to a higher state. The idea is that no matter what crosswinds and storms you might endure, you ought to keep your bow pointed at mental wealth. See essays with the hashtag #mentalwealth on this blog for more discussion about what mental wealth is.

What you learn from this type of analysis is that we make many, many decisions without goals. We make decisions based on habit, cultural expectation, or uninterrogated morality. Many decisions do not need to be made, and some decisions are irrelevant. We concern ourselves with information that does not lead to a decision. There is a huge amount of noise in our decision-making intuitions, and it is that noise, more than any inherent difficulty in deciding that hinders decisions.