How to Stop Making Stupid Decisions

throughout our lives we learn difficult lessons such as don't believe something just because your parents said it was true don't take a job just because you make more money don't date somebody just because they [ __ ] you like a porn star don't start a land war in russia these are all things that we need to know to get through life in one piece that's why this video is dedicated to learning how to make better decisions and you could start by deciding to subscribe and like this video our understanding of human decision making has evolved a lot over the millennia the ancients believe that your decisions were mostly based on your inherent character you were either born a piece of [ __ ] and did piece of [ __ ] things or you're born virtuous and did virtuous things later on in the middle ages people's decisions were seen as a cosmic struggle between good and evil people believed that angels and demons and spirits would take control of people and force them to do horrible things or great things it wasn't until the enlightenment that personal agency started to figure into these things people realize like oh hey people have free will they can do whatever they want they can choose to be good and evil they can change as life goes on these ideas particularly started with the work of john locke in the mid 1600s locke said that we were born a blank slate or tabula rasa he said that all of our experiences that happen to us etch into our personality what we will seek into the world so if i grow up to be a total [ __ ] for brains that's probably because you know my parents were [ __ ] for brains or the people around me were [ __ ] for brains basically locked correctly identified that many of our values and beliefs throughout our life come from us from our environment but the ultimate philosophical [ __ ] fest of personal agency came from everybody's favorite capitalist adam smith it was with the rise of capitalism and international trade that people really started to understand that individual motives and decisions when taken in aggregate can be better for all early economists began to seize society in terms of everybody making individual decisions based on rational cost and benefit everything became an economic decision the choice to leave my hometown and go live in the big city became an economic decision are the benefits better than the cost so the prevailing view was that ultimately everybody behaves in a rational and competent manner this idea that everybody is quietly subconsciously weighing the cost and benefits in our head is something that's known as cognitive cost benefit analysis it's very simple like let's say i'm laying on my couch and my trash is overflowing i don't want to [ __ ] take out the trash that's a drag so in my head there's a little scale that's going on benefit of sitting on the couch all day benefit of taking out the trash which one weighs more now everybody has a different threshold where at some point the garbage starts to stink starts to make your house all smelly you start to get really annoyed at yourself feel like a waste of a human being and suddenly the scales tip and you get off your ass and you take the garbage out you can visualize most basic human behaviors in this manner the problem is is when you get some major life decisions let's say i'm trying to decide whether i'm gonna quit my job as a writer and become a monk for the next five years i can kind of do the cost and benefit thing but the problem is is that the repercussions are so massive and so ambiguous it's impossible to objectively know like what is the value of quitting my career what is the value of moving to a cave and staring at a wall for the next five years what is the cost we don't really know we vaguely know we think we know but we are very bad at extrapolating large-scale events over long periods of time or events that have vast repercussions for the rest of our life so it was around the 1970s and 1980s that economists and psychologists started to finally pick up on this like wait a second this shit's actually really hard to judge it turns out that humans are terrible at predicting the actual costs and benefits to their actions we are consistently wrong at guessing how things are going to make us feel things that we think are gonna make us really happy turn out to only make us a little bit happy things that we think are gonna make us miserable turn out to not really make us miserable things that we think are gonna be okay end up being the best thing that we ever did in our lives and so in this sense it becomes very very hard to gauge accurately what a good decision is going to be for ourselves what these psychologists discovered is that we're basically all operating on a best guess pretty much all the time and a huge part of this is because we are easily swayed by various biases and prejudices or take for example every christmas shopping season on black friday there are videos of people fist fighting in walmart over like toasters and televisions i mean what the [ __ ] what toaster is worth getting clocked in the eye for so this is one of those cases where it took science like 300 years to catch up the common sense of course people behave you rationally of course we spend money on stupid [ __ ] of course we have no idea what's actually gonna make us happy and what's not even low stakes decisions about business or our career or whatever we'll be petrified i spent two years thinking about starting this youtube channel i've been on television multiple times i've done hundreds and hundreds of interviews i've been on camera i even own the equipment for like six months and i didn't [ __ ] do anything why i don't know i was just always making up reasons oh i'm too busy i don't know what to say nobody's gonna watch me it's just stupid i was anxious i was nervous it was a new thing it was challenging i didn't know if it was gonna work but when i sat down and actually thought through things strategically remove my own emotions from the situation i'm like yeah there's no reason not to do this why are you whining and freaking out making noises maybe people will see that i talk to myself well what's wrong with talking to yourself mark i don't know you talk to yourself all the time i mean writing is kind of a form of talking to yourself you do that all the time yeah people seem to like that what's your problem what's your problem [ __ ] you [ __ ] you where was i ultimately economics is right we do have this balance scale in our head the problem is is that we're not objective about what goes on each side our emotions and our bias perceptions put a finger on the scale on each side in different ways [Music] so the first thing to understand is how those biases and prejudices way on our mind how our perceptions of things get slanted how we get messed up and misjudged what is actually involved in a decision so there are a few books that i really encourage you to check out that can teach you these kinds of things that help you understand how your mind is just messing these calculations up all the time the first one is called predictably irrational by dan ariely the book is full of fascinating experiments where subjects consistently make poor choices simply by altering how a menu is laid out or if the more expensive prices are at the top versus the bottom there are all sorts of subtle things like this that affect our sense that something is cheap or expensive there's another great book called influence by robert cialdini it shows you all the ways that we are persuaded and manipulated into thinking things are better than they actually are there's one interesting experiment in the book where they found that people who cut in line piss everybody off i mean [ __ ] line cutters right but people who cut in line and then give a reason for cutting in line people don't get mad at them even if the reason makes absolutely no sense so in the experiment they had people cut in line for something and then turn around and say oh i'm sorry my dog died last week and people were like all right yeah go ahead what the [ __ ] another great book one of my personal favorites is stumbling on happiness by daniel gilbert stumbling on happiness has all of this interesting research around emotion how we misremember our emotions how we predict our emotions poorly how we think we were way more upset last year because dad missed our birthday than we actually were how we predict we're gonna be way more upset this year when dad misses our birthday stop missing my birthday dad and then finally the classic by the nobel laureate thinking fast and slow by daniel kahneman it is a dense comprehensive look at many of the cognitive biases and heuristics that [ __ ] us up in our decision making and it's uh it's eye-opening to say the least so that's the first step is to educate yourself on how your mind [ __ ] up step two is to utilize some tools to help you become more rational to help you externalize your thought process so that you can remove those emotional forces that are putting their finger on the scale the easiest way to do that is to write stuff down there's something about writing your thoughts down that forces you to look at them as if they're not your own so anytime in my life when i have a major decision to make i just start writing about it i start writing about my my thought process i start explaining all the evidence all the reasons why i want to make this decision and sure enough pretty much every single time i find that i'm overestimating things i find i'm underestimating things another way to do this obviously is to find an advisor or a mentor or somebody you look up to maybe even just a friend who isn't afraid to tell you you're an idiot if you need to hear it talk to them through your thought process and then actively ask them to challenge you on it and then the last strategy is something a little bit less scientific but also something i feel pretty strongly about that is optimize your decisions for zero regrets ultimately a lot of things are impossible to know if they're a good thing or not but if you ask yourself will i regret doing it or will i regret not doing it that can often give you your answer many years ago i had the opportunity to move to new york city it was a daunting choice i'd been living abroad for seven years i had just gotten engaged i wasn't sure if i wanted to live in the united states anymore new york is really [ __ ] expensive i wasn't sure if i could afford it i asked myself 20 years from now if i don't do this will i regret it and the answer was yeah i think i would always wonder what it would have been like to live in new york city then i asked myself if i moved to new york do i think i would regret it in 20 years and the answer is no because if it sucks you just leave again therefore it became clear that moving to new york was the choice of minimal regret and that's a tool that i've used in many of my major life decisions i've simply asked myself will i regret doing this or will i regret not doing it and 90 of the time i would regret not doing it so i just [ __ ] do it and that brings me to the harsh truth of the day [Applause] the harsh truth of the day is that even if you make great decisions you don't know that they're great decisions in the moment every great decision still feels really tenuous and scary you're full of doubt you don't know if it's gonna work out or not i think there's this idea that the right decision it pops up and you're like oh my god it's like the [ __ ] clouds part and it's like this is the answer to everything that never happens good decisions especially the best decisions the reason they're the best decisions is because it's so difficult to see what the correct move is so in that sense the best decision should be scary it should feel uncomfortable it should push your boundaries a little bit because that's part of what makes it the best decision it's a signal of the significance of the moment so don't look for decisions that feel comfortable and feel easy look for the decisions that inspire the doubt that inspire the insecurity because that's where the real [ __ ] is so like this video subscribe to it and post in the comments what decision are you struggling with and who knows maybe you'll get an answer until next time manson out [Music]

Channel: Mark Manson

Views: 296,274

Keywords: how to make decisions, mark manson, markmanson, what to do with my life, passion, life purpose, purpose in life, motivation, careers, self knowledge, self development, self improvement tips, self improvement videos, life, life choices, life choices and decisions, life advice, how to make decisions ted talk, how to make decisions with god, how to make decisions faster, how to make decisions in life, how to make descisions, How to make decisions for yourself

Id: CQ58nAjr9cI

Length: 12min 56sec (776 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 18 2020