Decision Tips
Consider decisions in context.
No amount of sophistication is going to ally the fact that all your knowledge is about the past and all your decisions are about the future.
—I. E. Wilson
Two years ago, Julie bought a puppy. She’d been talking about getting a dog for a long time, and she finally decided to get one. Garth, a golden retriever, now weighs nearly 100 pounds and provides Julie with a wealth of love and companionship. But as Julie has learned having a dog has its downsides. She had to spend $1,200 to fence in her small backyard. Because Garth loves to romp and play, Julie has to take him on regular visits to the park. Julie also has to find time to take Garth for grooming every few months and for his occasional visits to the vet when he’s not feeling too well. In addition, Julie’s active travel schedule now has to be coordinated with hiring a dog sitter or taking Garth to a kennel.
Julie’s experience illustrates that decisions are not made in isolation. Buying Garth set in motion a number of future decisions and imposed constraints on some of those decisions. Almost every decision you make is constrained by those decisions that preceded it and limits the decisions you’ll make in the future. That is, decisions in the real world are linked and interconnected.
The rational decision process described in Chapter 2, “The Search for Rationality,” is simplistic and fails to capture this linkage. The rational process is discrete and closed. It assumes that every decision is an isolated event with a clear beginning and a clear ending. But that’s not the way it is in reality. Julie’s travel decisions today, for instance, are influenced by the decision she made two years ago to buy a dog. Still, many of us fail to grasp this connectivity between our choices. We make a decision as if it has no bearing on future decisions, and that’s a mistake. The options you have available today are a result of choices you made in the past.
It can be helpful to think of single decisions as points in a stream of decisions. Every decision comes with a history and baggage from decisions that preceded it. It doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It has a context. And every current decision will limit future decisions.
Decisions in the real world are linked and interconnected.
There is no shortage of examples to illustrate that every decision is actually part of a stream of decisions. For instance, in the political arena, U. S. President Barak Obama’s economic and foreign policies are largely limited by the choices made by the Bushes, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and decades of previous presidential decisions. Issues in the Arab-Israeli conflict that current negotiators have to deal with go back to decisions made in the 1940s and earlier.
Julie’s decision to get a dog set in motion a number of additional decisions and limited still others. In a similar vein, major decisions can create overwhelming constraints on later decisions and dramatically change your life. A friend of mine moved from Williston, North Dakota, to Washington, D. C. Ever since, she continually complains about the difficulty of meeting men. Her decision to move from Williston, where there are two single men for every single woman, to D. C. where women favor men 5 to 4, is clearly limiting her current social life. The decision to smoke cigarettes, not attend college, select your first full-time job, choose a spouse, have a child, or buy a home are all major decisions that will limit your future choices.
Rationality demands that you think through your decisions before you act. But my argument here goes further: To maintain rationality over the long term, you need to consider decisions in context. Decisions made in the past are ghosts that continually haunt current choices, so what you decide today will influence and constrain your choices tomorrow. A decision that, at a moment in time, may seem inconsequential can haunt you for years into the future. For instance, your choice of a college major may seem trivial, but it’s likely to shape the first job you’ll get, which will determine where you might live, how much you’ll make, and even the type of friends you’ll have. Similarly, although no one is likely to argue that choosing a spouse is a minor decision, a woman friend of mine understood the full ramifications of this decision when she once remarked to me that, “who a woman marries will determine where she lives, the size of her home, where she shops, who many of her friends are, how she spends her evenings, where she goes on her vacations, where her kids will go to college, and probably even where she’ll be buried.”
In addition to looking at decisions in context, you can improve your decision making by looking ahead and ensuring that current decisions fit with your goals. Look ahead to see the future consequences of today’s action. By doing so, you’ll lessen the chance that you’ll ignore or limit future opportunities. Because today’s decisions will shape and constrain future decisions, you need to assess where today’s decisions fit into your future. You want to make sure the commitments you’re making today are consistent with your goals a month from now, a year from now, ten years down the road, and so forth.
Consider decisions in context.
Look ahead to the future consequences of today’s action.
Link current decisions to future goals.