Replace decisions with rules to overcome weaknesses
Summary
- Making a rule allows us to bypass having to make a decision, which potentially could allow us to make the wrong decision
Details
- It is easy to make the wrong decision because most bad decisions (skip a workout), dont have immediate bad consequences. But over time, the effects of many bad decisions are negative consequences
- We may have blind spots in our judgement - rules help automate desired behavioiur
- A rule may prevent others from trying to push us 'I dont drink soda' though they may question a decision
- One good rule is never to answer immediately - say 'I will get back to you on that once I have thought about it'
References
Quotes
Bad habits are easy to acquire when there is a delay between action and consequence. If you eat a chocolate bar or skip a workout today, you’re not going to suddenly go from healthy to unhealthy. Work late and miss dinner with your family a couple nights, and it won’t damage your relationship. If you spend today on social media instead of doing work, you’re not going to get fired. However, these choices can end up becoming habits through repetition and accumulate into disaster. The formula for failure is a few small errors consistently repeated. Just
because the results aren’t immediately felt doesn’t mean consequences aren’t coming.
There are two ways to manage your weaknesses. The first is to build your strengths, which will help you overcome the weaknesses you’ve acquired. The second is to implement safeguards, which will help you manage any weaknesses you’re having trouble overcoming with strength alone. In addition, safeguards help us manage weaknesses that are impossible to overcome—for example, the ones we owe to our biological limitations.
Some of our weaknesses are the limitations on what we can know, our blind spots. We’re all familiar with perceptual blind spots—our inability to see accurately beyond a certain distance, and in environments without enough light. We have deaf spots, too; we can’t hear sounds below a certain volume or above a certain pitch. What’s true of perception is also true of cognition—our ability to think and judge.
In my conversation with Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, the godfather
of cognitive biases and thinking errors, he revealed an unexpected way we can improve our judgment: replacing decisions with rules.[2] It turns out that rules can help us automate our behavior to put us in a position to achieve success and accomplish our goals.
Why not bypass individual choices altogether and create an automatic behavior—a rule—that requires no decision-making in the moment and that gets no pushback from others? Why not set a rule that you order a social drink only when you actually feel like one, and never just to fit in with what the group is doing? Similarly, suppose your goal is to drink less soda.[*] Rather than deciding on a case-by-case basis whether you’re going to drink soda— something that requires a lot of effort and that is prone to error—make a rule instead. For example, “I only drink soda at dinner on Friday,” or maybe, “I don’t drink soda at all.” Having a rule means not having to decide at every meal. The execution path is short, and less error prone. In a quirk of psychology, people typically don’t argue with your personal rules. They just accept them as features of who you are. People question decisions, but they respect rules. Kahneman told me his favorite rule was never to say yes to a request on the phone. He knows that he wants people to like him, so he wants to say yes in the moment, but after filling up his schedule with things that didn’t make him happy, he decided to be more vigilant about what he agrees to do and why. When people ask him for things over the phone now, he says something along the lines of, “I’ll have to get back to you after I think about it.” Not only does this give him time to think without the immediate socialpressure, but it also allows a lot of these requests to just drop away because people choose not to follow up. He rarely gets back to any of these people and says yes.