I was called in once by a company that made high-end one-off pieces of furniture to sell locally. They showed me some of it – lovely big kitchen tables, handcrafted wardrobes and armoires, solid traditional dressers. Beautiful. Their problem was that they were struggling to sell the stuff. They had discovered, somewhat late in the day, that most local people were looking for side tables and little cupboards and wall shelves, and there was almost no demand for the big luxury furniture their workshop was filling up with.
It’s a pretty good example of how big a hole you can dig for yourself by making false assumptions. Want another one? I know a couple who decided they wanted to move back to the area they grew up in 40 years previously. They bought a house, got planning permission for a new build in the garden, built the new house, sold off the original house – all of which took literally years – and then realised, when they were finally able to move, that actually they didn’t want to be that far away from the grandchildren and all their friends. They had just assumed they’d be happy back in their old stomping ground without thinking through that assumption.
When you consider it, most big decisions are based on a whole series of choices or mini decisions. So you might decide that you want to start your own business. Now you have to decide what sort of business, where you’ll run it from, how you’ll raise the funds, and so on. You’ll draw up a business plan, which will entail putting together estimates of costs and income and likely sales. The problem comes when you sort of forget they were only estimates and treat them as firm figures. Or assume there’s a market when there isn’t – or at least not without adjusting the costs, price, or products or service you offer. You could end up ploughing all your savings into a doomed business – pretty much what my furniture makers had done.
Want to change jobs? Once you’ve made that decision, you’ll go on to decide whether you want to stay in the industry or change careers, and then what jobs to apply for, and even whether to relocate. But hang on … suppose the original decision was wrong? You started at square two and assumed a new job was the answer to all your problems – a classic form of jumping to conclusions. Those early wrong assumptions are especially dangerous, because so many of your subsequent mini decisions are predicated on them.
If you don’t want to make this kind of mistake, you need to ask yourself right from the start ‘Why do I think this? What’s my evidence for it? How do I know it’s true?’ Get other people’s opinions as well as your own. Ask as many people as you reasonably can to interrogate your plans, cross-examine you on where you’re getting your information from, query your assumptions, question why you’re so sure this is the right decision. Just make sure you don’t dig yourself a big deep hole through not thinking properly.
MOST BIG DECISIONS ARE BASED ON A WHOLE SERIES OF CHOICES OR MINI DECISIONS