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Don’t fall into the mental wormhole: act fast, discard fast, move on.
Today’s conclusion prompt: What decisions are you currently struggling with and how do you deal with them?
My three simple rules: set a time limit, accept imperfection while building, and that you’re going to discard 90% of what you’ll start, so you might as well take action more quickly.
No decision, no action, no experience, no learning
Looking to take a course online?
Or trying to choose a productivity tool?
Or a platform to host your services?
What to have for dinner?
I used to massively struggle with making decisions. Sometimes it took me hours to choose a restaurant or product.
I remember how I was lying on the couch at my friend’s house. We were trying to choose a restaurant.
“This one?”
“Only has 4.2 stars.”
“This one?”
“Found a bad review and I think the photos on the ninth one you proposed looked better.”
In the end, we got so hungry that we simply ordered a pizza from the same delivery service we had always used.
That implies that our fear of making courageous decisions makes us default into known territory.
A tired brain means: no new decision, no new action, no new experience, no progress or learning.
Make courageous decisions fast while your brain still has the energy.
How are you supposed to make important decisions if you lose 3 hours deciding where to eat?
It has always been bad but gotten worse – don’t get lost in the mental wormhole
American psychologist Barry Schwartz researched the topic and wrote a book about it: “The Paradox of Choice.” You can watch his Ted Talk here.
Among other examples, he talks about going to your local electronics retailer and choosing from a vast amount of stereo systems.
This speech was uploaded to YouTube in 2005.
The bad news: things got even worse over the years.
2005 was also the year that Google Maps was launched.
Today Google Maps lists 200 million restaurants and businesses.
And while you can’t decide where to have dinner or lunch, life passes right in front of you.
Make a decision and if the food is horrible and overpriced, live with it! I always tell my partner, “We’re adventurers. So we have to learn to live with the bad experiences, too. It’s simply a part of the adventure.”
Talking to a friend who wanted to take a course, he shared a similar experience with me:
He essentially just started a collection of possible websites, courses, financing models, and whatnot.
And the incoming, not stream, but roaring river of possibilities, opportunities, and better platforms wouldn’t stop.
In the end, all he had was not a new experience or learning, just a long collection of possible courses.
When struggling with a decision Stick to the following simple rules
- Set time limits for research and make fake decisions
Literally set a timer on your phone and when it rings, move on.
No more reviews, no more comparisons. Buy, send, start, try, and apply. Tell yourself that you’re just playing around with the decision for now.
Ask yourself: “How does it feel to have made the decision? What are the next steps? What are the possibilities and next actions?”
- Don’t get in the way of your creative flow by looking for perfect solutions
It doesn’t have to be super clean, super professional, or super organized at first. Let the system develop naturally over time around your routine. First discover how you can best do your most important, most valuable work.
- Discard as many options as possible quickly by trying them
Chances are very high that in the process of self-awareness building, you’ll discard tons of decisions.
Among hundreds of other things over the past ten years, I’ve tried and discarded animation (too repetitive for my inattentive brain), storyboarding (same), ice-skating (bad coordination), becoming a gardener, and UI design with Figma (too boring), simply by learning them, trying them, and noticing that they’re not for me.
Accept that you don’t fully know what you like and don’t like yet. Try fast.
Take it as an adventure and accept that there will be bad outcomes
So go ahead now. Start, try, build, buy, send, and actively apply and see how you feel with it. Is it fun? Why? Why not? What would need to change to make it more fun? Like that, you can build your self-awareness muscle. Get to know yourself better by having the experience.
What decisions are you currently struggling with and how do you deal with them?
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