I’m not the only one advocating for keeping decisions simple.
Harvard professor Daniel Gilbert, who we discussed earlier, calls this “the unanticipated joy of being totally stuck.” He shows that the decisions we come to regard as better decisions are the ones we believe we didn’t have a choice in. And if we did have a choice? Then we’re prone to second-guessing ourselves. Doubt, wonder, and what-ifs all start seeping in. Likewise, Barry Schwartz, the author of The Paradox of Choice, observes that “though modern Americans have more choice than any group of people ever has before, and thus, presumably, more freedom and autonomy, we don’t seem to be benefiting from it psychologically.”
What decisions in your life are you overthinking?
I get we all want to maximize. We need to maximize! We have to maximize. The best date! The best party! The best school! The best house!
But if you think you could like either option of what you’re choosing between… well, just pick one.
Tell yourself you don’t have a choice.
And never, never stop.
In my dad’s case, he thought he would like Canada or the US and the Canada letter came first.
So he arrived in Toronto with eight dollars in his pocket, which he spent in the first couple days.
My dad got a job as the first high school physics teacher in the local school district. “Physics is the king of the sciences,” he’d say with a smile. And he even looked like a physicist, too, with wavy black hair, thick, long sideburns, and big boxy glasses. I sometimes thought of him as a bit of an Indian Einstein.
Sideburns have never gone out of style with my dad. He is more ruthlessly indifferent to fashion than anyone I know. Even when Jason Priestley and Luke Perry repopularized long sideburns on Beverly Hills 90210 and suddenly every high school kid who could grow them was sporting big burns, did my dad chop his off? No, he just spent a random year on trend.
My dad lives by the book. He’s the guy driving the speed limit on the highway in the right lane with everybody passing him the entire time. Nobody else is going the speed limit.
When we were kids, we used to make fun of him and tell him to drive faster and he’d say, “What happens if we get there five minutes earlier?” His plan was always to leave five minutes earlier and drive the speed limit.
My dad’s the guy who tells the cashier she gave him an extra quarter back by mistake.
And his honesty sure did make him terrible at board games.
My family loved playing board games together but my dad never got the hang of them. He was worst at Monopoly. He could roll the dice, move the boot, but he never won. Why? Because if he landed on your property and you forgot to charge him rent, he’d tell you.
He’d have his $20 ready and hand it over proudly as if to say, “Thank you! Thank you for letting me stay at your fine green house on Baltic Avenue.”
“Dad,” we’d say, shaking our heads. “If we forget to charge you rent, don’t tell us. That’s how you get more money! That’s how you win the game!”
But he didn’t get that.
He’d say, “If I stay at a property you own, I should pay my rent. And then you would pay me if you landed on mine, and we’d all be a lot happier instead of trying to trick each other all the time like you guys do.”
My dad was trying to teach us something.
He was always trying to teach us something.
Because, more than anything, that’s what he was: a teacher.
When I’d bring home my math or physics textbook and have trouble figuring out my homework, my dad would pull up a chair beside me and try to show me how to do it. When I still didn’t understand, he would try again, except this time he would try teaching me a different way. If I didn’t get it, he’d change again, and then he’d change again, and again, and again, until I, like any of the thousands of students he taught, finally figured it out.
He never, never stopped.
He’s like one of those toy cars where you pull the wheels back and when it hits a wall it just turns and goes a different way.
There is something about that.
We live in an age where if somebody doesn’t understand us, we show impatience, frustration, or surprise. We say it again. We yell! We pound our fists! We say it slower. So when somebody doesn’t just repeat things, but changes what they say, you know they have a different view. It’s not that you’re not getting it. It’s that it’s hard to get. And the responsibility shifts to the person who’s trying to explain.
I know I need to get better at remembering that it’s not on them if somebody doesn’t get what I’m saying. It’s on me.
That’s the root of real empathy.
My dad never raised his voice or got impatient. He never made you feel slow because you weren’t catching on. He just kept changing how he taught you until his message got through.
In a way, all we’re ever doing is seeing things, learning things, trying things in new ways.
And beyond never never stopping, my dad believed that no type of learning was off limits. He explained mortgage rates to me when I was three. He explained life insurance to me when I was four. And I can clearly remember asking him about the stock market when I was five or six years old. I was mesmerized by all the pages in the newspaper with the tiny little writing in columns. As always, he saw a learning opportunity and made a game of it with me.
“What’s something you like?” he asked me.
“Um, Coke!” I answered.
“Okay,” he said. “Look here. See this KO in the newspaper. That’s Coca-Cola. It’s $50. For $50, you can buy a share of Coca-Cola. That means you can own some of the company. Do you want to buy some?”
Of course I did! I had some money saved up, so I gave it to my dad, and he bought me a couple shares of Coca-Cola.
My dad and I bought a big piece of poster board and we made a line graph of the Coca-Cola share price on the left side with the dates at the bottom. He taught me how to check the stock price every day and then I’d keep track of how much my stock was worth. I couldn’t believe when the stock went up and up and up. He got me hooked on the idea that money can actually grow if you put it in the right business.
Also: never underestimate demand for sugar water.