I'm Russell and this is the Science of Self, brought to you by Newton Media Group and Peter Hollins.
Stick around to learn how to improve your life from the inside out.
Today is May 25, 2023, and here are today's quick hits.
Today is not Star Wars Day, but today is the day that Star Wars premiered way back in 1977.
It's also a day to do some tap dancing, wrap up your throat and keep it nice and warm because today is both Towel Day and Thyroid Day.
It's a day to celebrate and commemorate African liberation as Global Africa Day hits.
For me, today is Geek Pride Day, so you can celebrate that with a bath bomb.
If your name is Cody or Enzo or George, today is also your day.
Our lunch menu from today's holidays and celebrations is again limited.
It's Brown Bagged Day, so you have to bring your own, but you can accompany that with either a wine or more specifically, a Chardonnay.
Both those are celebrated today.
And now onto the content from Peter Holland's book the Art of Strategic Decision Making.
Peter Hollins presents us with several techniques that will slow down our decisions and give us a chance to think through things carefully before we get carried away with the preferred outcome and forget to consider other aspects.
He's going to provide us with templates that we can use to make sure all of our bases are covered and that we're making the best move for ourselves in light of all the relevant factors.
First up on the list is the 1010 Rule.
Thanks for listening today.
The first part to incorporate into your mental checklist is the 1010 Rule.
The Ten 1010 Rule is very straightforward and asks you to travel through time.
When you're at a fork in the road, ask yourself how you feel about the choice you make ten minutes from now, ten days from now, and ten months from now.
Depending on the scope and context of the decision, you can make it longer or shorter terms.
In nature, shorter periods of time correspond to decisions with smaller steaks and more immediate consequences, while longer periods of time correspond with larger steaks and more delayed consequences.
If you want to debate eating a slice of pizza, you might do ten minutes, 10 hours and ten days.
You'd find that eating a pizza or hamburger in the moment really doesn't affect your life very much in any timeline.
If you want to decide what city to move to, you can use ten weeks, ten months, and then ten years in the future.
You can see how your decisions can greatly impact your life if you view it through the lens of the future, travel through time and explore the consequences.
In each scenario, the 1010 Rule begs you to ask your future self about the decisions and approaches you make today.
Make sure you're happy with the outcomes of each timeline you think about.
If you aren't, is it actually a wise decision?
Likewise, if you aren't happy with all of the outcomes, then are you willing to take on that informed risk?
The rule lays out consequences and after effects in a very real and tangible manner and forces you to step back from your immediate emotion or impulse about a course of action or decision.
It creates a mindset in which you articulate your short and long term goals before moving toward them.
How do they play out and what ripple effects will they have?
The 1010 rule impacts your range of choices because things that may seem important or easy to do now might not lead to either the small or big goals you want for the future.
They might actually lead nowhere and just waste your time.
If you think through the appropriate 1010 time periods, you might find that they're detrimental in a longer time period and you are seduced into taking a short term profit for a long term loss.
When you apply the 1010 rule, you train your mind to look at long term implications.
It is just as important for you to train your mind to look at your options and see whether they will advance you toward achieving your bigger goals.
At the very least, you'll get a feel for the overall impact of the choice in front of you and whether it furthers your ultimate success or not.
It can impact the things you eat, the clothes you buy, the jobs you apply for, the people you spend time with, and obviously, the business opportunities you wish to take advantage of.
Many decisions take time to mature into their full consequences.
Doing our language lesson today will not likely have any benefits for us tomorrow or in ten days time.
But if we keep it up, the benefits in ten years will be well worth it.
If we only consider an hour or a day or a week in advance, we'll never give these actions their full weight and significance.
This exercise highlights what is truly important and what is not so consequential to you.
Remove impulses and temptation from your life and let discipline propel you forward.
The 1010 rule also teaches you to analyze delayed gratification.
You might feel great about a decision in ten minutes, but you might feel terrible about it in ten days, or you might feel terrible about a decision in the next ten minutes.
Maybe you have to break up with someone or push through a grueling workout, but you will certainly appreciate the outcome ten years later.
I e by releasing yourself to be in a better relationship and having a healthier body.
This rule allows you to remember that sometimes outcomes of decisions play out over long periods, and a good decision may look different depending on when you look at it.
Worldview the second part of your mental checklist is literally a checklist of questions to ask yourself to make sure that you are actually making a wise choice for yourself.
These questions make sure your decisions are aligned with your worldview, and they help you eliminate options right off the bat when you see that they don't fit in.
Again, these might not be entirely new concepts to you, but it's actually going through the motions that will set you apart from others and make your decisions as optimal as can be.
To make your decisions, ask yourself these questions what are the main problems you're trying to solve?
Can you solve them in any other way, either individually or together?
Do you have all the information necessary to make the best decision possible?
If not, what information would you have in a perfect world?
Are any of the most important factors subject to change anytime soon?
What realistic factors could instantly make you regret your decision?
What's the opportunity cause for this decision?
In other words, what would you miss out on to take this current opportunity?
Does this get you closer to your overall pertinent goals, or does it take you further away from them?
Are you making this decision out of a sense of duty and obligation or out of your actual free will?
When you get a sense of the answers to these questions, it becomes hard to lie to yourself or fool others into believing you.
You run out of space to do something that isn't good for you.
When you articulate your motivations and reasoning, when you can pass all of these questions, it becomes clear that you're making the decision yourself because you want to and with a clear purpose.
Going through this part of the checklist is like going through a mini polygraph the lie detector test.
It cuts through the chatter and makes clear what you want, even if it wasn't clear to you beforehand.
For example, maybe you're trying to make a big change and want to move to rural Spain and start life over again.
You move through the questions what are the main problems you're trying to solve?
Can you solve them in any other way, either individually or together?
Asking honestly and putting your red Sigmund Freud hat on?
You realize that you're craving excitement and more meaning in life and hope that a move will bring this about, but you actually haven't considered less drastic ways to get the same result.
Do you have all the information necessary to make the best decision possible?
If not, what information would you have in a perfect world?
Well, your friend moved to rural Spain and seems happy.
Granted, that might not be quite enough information.
Are any of the most important factors subject to change anytime soon?
What realistic factors could instantly make you regret your decision?
Asking yourself this you realize that two things give you pause.
Your boss may be on the brink of giving you a promotion, and your brother may have a baby within the next year who you wouldn't be able to visit if you moved so far away, and so on.
Now, these questions aren't designed to just deflate poorly thought out plans.
Despite discouraging answers, you may actually decide to move to Spain after all.
But the questions and the perspective they force you to take encourage you to think more realistically about the move and take beneficial action.
Boundaries the third part of the mental checklist for optimal decisions is to set subjective boundaries for your decisions.
A boundary can be thought of a decision you make once, so you don't have to constantly negotiate the same decisions over and over again.
Having a boundary is not just an act of asserting your personal limitations and values.
It's also a way to save time and conserve mental energy.
You don't have to really think about a good boundary.
It makes decisions for you automatically.
It's important to set these beforehand because when you're in the heat of the moment, it's very difficult to think clearly and objectively when you set them beforehand, as you can do while reading this chapter, you can control your impulses and emotional reactions better.
You can think of boundaries as rules and hard guidelines for you to abide by.
They help you limit your choices and can even allow you to come to a decision through a process of elimination.
For example, if you go on a shopping trip, you might decide on a spending limit.
You can't buy a jacket for over $100, or you can't spend over $200 total for the day.
This is a specific metric that you can't exceed under any circumstances.
It allows you to quickly eliminate options because you're simply limited to things under a certain amount.
It narrows your scope based on predetermined requirements.
Specific limits can help reduce your options because you can also set a limit on the number of options you even consider, or a time limit on how long you will have until you pull the trigger.
Another boundary is to name deal breakers or options that you will never consider based on a trait or characteristic.
For example, if a car has a safety rating below a certain number, it's out of the question for you.
Another example is to not visit cities that drop below a certain temperature.
Deal breakers help you focus on what you prioritize and immediately avoid things you don't to save time.
A final type of boundary to help streamline your decision making is to apply criteria for your decisions.
I will only do it if it is X.
Again, these are decided on beforehand so you aren't influenced by a lack of willpower or emotion.
You can think of these as the opposite of deal breakers.
If an option possesses this trait or characteristic, it is automatically your choice.
For example, you might only choose the best camera on the market below $200.
It would be your one trait to look for, and it would rule out every camera except two or three.
At the very least, this excludes all of the bad options and leaves you a small subset that you would probably be happy with at this point.
You might even be able to pick randomly after applying one of these boundaries.
Another example is to only spend time pursuing a sales lead if it will be worth over $5,000, so you aren't wasting your time on something that would not amount to much.
You could also only watch movies in theaters that have a certain ranking and ignore all others that fall below it.
Finally, you could decide to not spend over $15 per restaurant meal, which would severely limit your choices.
Not only does this make your life easier by preemptively making sure your decisions fit into your life, but it also serves to limit decision fatigue.
Recall that the ability to make decisions is not infinite and has a limited capacity due to the consumption of glucose in your brain.
When you can apply these filters to many aspects of your life, especially trivial everyday decisions, you are able to save your mental resources for what really matters.
Beyond pros and cons, the first method is to write a simple pros and cons list with a twist.
This is actually a method American Founding Father Benjamin Franklin described in a letter dispensing advice on how to make intelligent decisions.
The typical pros and cons list works by listing what you would gain from a choice in one column and what you would lose from the decision in another column.
Here's what a list might look like if you're contemplating eating pizza.
Pros it's tasty.
You satisfy cravings.
You love cheese.
It's in a nice part of the city.
It's your cheat day.
You'll feel happier after you can save money.
Cons you are still trying to lose weight.
You don't need it.
You'll binge on soda too.
You'll feel gassy afterward.
It's short and effective and helps you organize all the thoughts running through your head.
You can categorize factors as simply positive or negative and see which side appears to have more than the other.
It allows you to virtually see your arguments instead of debating them mentally.
It gives you a way to analyze your choices based on what appears to be important.
It also introduces the idea that you're making a decision about changing the status quo or not, which accurately reflects what you are actually deciding about.
Make sure you're asking the right question.
Pros and cons lists highlight the importance of understanding what issues you face in making decisions.
However, basic pros and cons lists break down in the face of more complex decisions than eating pizza or not.
What if you're trying to analyze whether you should move to a new city or not?
What if you're trying to make a decision at work that has the potential to bring in 2 million in revenue or not?
A simple pros and cons list breaks down in these situations because every factor appears to be the same and only counts for one in other words, let's suppose you have a pro of making 2 million and a con of an increased commute by ten minutes.
They obviously aren't equal in significance or magnitude, but in a simple pros and cons list they would be because they take up the same amount of space, one line on a sheet of paper.
There's got to be a better way.
How can we improve your old fashioned pros and cons lists to be more effective and informative?
We can do it by quantifying them.
It can work in a few ways.
You'll still have a column each for positive and negatives that would occur if you engage in an action.
But you'll be assigning values on a scale of zero to ten to each argument that represents how important it is to you.
For the previous example of revenue versus commute time, you would assign the revenue a value of ten, where the commute time might have a value of 1.5.
The higher the score, the more important it is to you.
There are a couple of ways to look at the results.
The first one is to simply decide in favor of whichever side's values add up to be higher.
This is black and white.
For example, if your pros add up to be 74 and your cons add up to be 75, you would choose in favor of the con and not partake in the act.
This is a straightforward and direct approach, but many people will have difficulty with it if the results are close.
Indeed, if you're choosing between moving to a new city versus staying put, perhaps you should have overwhelming reasons and evidence to do so.
Otherwise, there are not enough compelling reasons in this case.
The second way to look at the results is to only act if the value of the pros list comes to be twice the value of the cons side.
For example, if your pros add up to 90 but your cons add up to 70, you probably shouldn't act because there isn't strong enough reason to break your inertia and uproot yourself from the status quo.
It's not worth it to expend the effort into learning new tasks and changing your lifestyle for a marginal gain of 20 value points, so to speak.
This is an approach that favors the status quo because it realizes that motion is not always progress.
Sometimes it's just wasted effort.
The second method is what I personally prefer because I, like many people, am lazy.
I don't want to do something that will require extra effort and work if it doesn't result in a significant gain for me.
If there isn't a clear, powerful reason for me to do something, why do it in this way?
I try to make decisions as binary as possible.
Is there a powerful reason that significantly overrides the negatives?
If so, let it fly.
If not, don't waste your effort unless you're seeking change for change's sake.
There are multiple standards of interpreting the results that your quantified, pros and cons list produces, whichever is greater.
If the pros side is twice as large as the cons or any other arbitrary number differential that appeals to you, what matters is you are simultaneously finding your priorities as you assign values to everything.
There are also multiple ways to quantify the lists themselves.
Instead of how important something might be to you.
You can assign values based on the following how much money it saves how much time it saves how close it gets you to a certain goal how happy it makes you how annoyed it makes you how much your significant other will care about it.
This allows you to adapt your pros and cons list to the specifics of your situation, which is good practice.
In general, if you use generalized or abstract pros and cons arguments that are irrelevant to your situation or worldview, you'll get an answer that doesn't accurately reflect your situation.
For example, suppose you're trying to decide whether to buy a new car or stick with the same car you've had for the last five years.
Let's list the pros and cons quantified with how important the factor is to my happiness.
Pros feel better about self.
Six, impress women more easily.
Eight, better mileage on commute.
Three, more comfortable leather.
Eight, better sound system.
Eight cons cost.
Nine, don't need it.
Seven, bad buying time right now.
Eight.
Would need to take a loan from parents.
Six, higher insurance.
Seven.
It's the act of going through and honestly assigning values to everything that also lets you find what is important to you.
Some people might want a car because they figure it will be better off for their commute.
But when they honestly assess themselves, it might just be because they enjoy the ego boost a fancy car provides on a daily basis.
And that's okay.
Understanding what you're basing your decisions on is as important as the factors themselves.
Second, if you can understand what factors are important in your decisions, it allows you to see what you can address independently of the big decision itself.
In this example, it appears that independent of the new car, the sound system and the leather seats appear to be very important.
Instead of going all in on a new car, you can just address what bothers you about the current car and make a more efficient decision.
The last important factor in better quantified, pros and cons lists is to be aware of which factors are mixed and which are subject to change in the future.
Your world may not be the same next year as it is today, much less tomorrow.
The things on your list may change for better or worse.
However, only some of those will change, while others are more or less static for all time.
This is something to keep in mind because it means a con may not always be a con, and a pro may not always be a pro?
How much deviation are you willing to factor in and accept as time goes on?
For example, do you expect that you'll always want a better sound system, or is that something that's in your mind right now because of a new coworker's influence?
Differentiate between what can and cannot be changed at all, and make sure you aren't going into a decision with the idea that factors will change.
That's like marrying someone depending on the fact that they will undergo a sex change.
It's putting the cart before the horse in a major way.
Hopefully, this can change the way you fundamentally look at pros and cons lists.
This can be as complex as you wish.
Satisficing.
The next part of your mental checklist is to ask whether you are embodying this unfamiliar word or not.
The word satisfies is a combination of the words satisfy and suffice.
It's a term that Herbert Simon coined in the 1950s, and it represents what we should shoot for rather than something that is guaranteed to optimize and maximize our happiness.
Perfection can be deadly in the decision making process as we'll explore a little more in a later chapter, but there are ways to moderate unrealistic expectations and keep our eye on moderate outcomes.
After all, enough is just that it's enough.
Generally, people can be split into those two categories those who seek to satisfy a decision and those who seek to maximize a decision.
Let's suppose that you're shopping for a new bike.
The maximizer would devote hours to researching their decision and evaluating as many options as possible.
They would want to get the best one possible for their purposes and want to leave no stone unturned.
They want 100% satisfaction, despite the law of diminishing returns and the Pareto principle, which would warn against such measures.
By contrast, the satisfy sir is just shooting to be satisfied and for an option that suffices for their purposes.
They want something that works well enough to make them satisfied and pleased, but not overjoyed or ecstatic.
They aim for good enough and stop once they find that these are very different scales.
And for this reason, studies have shown that Satisfyers tend to be happier with their decisions, while maximizers tend to keep agonizing and thinking about greener pastures after their decisions.
Maximization represents a conundrum in our modern age because while it is more possible than at any point in human history to get exactly what you want, there is also the paradox of choice, which makes it impossible to be satisfied.
On a practical matter, there are few decisions where we should strive to maximize our value.
Sure, you want to take your time and make an effort when choosing a life partner or picking out a permanent tattoo that's going to be visible to everyone for the rest of your life.
But deciding what color socks to wear, you're better off with a decision that's not perfect but good enough.
Therefore, put forth proportional effort and just make a choice already.
Most of the time, you simply want something that is reliable and works.
Suppose you're in a grocery store and you're trying to pick out the type of peanut butter you want.
What should you shoot for here?
Satisficing or Maximizing?
What are the opportunity costs of spending 15 minutes ruminating over peanut butter?
How much mental power did you waste reading the labels in detail?
And what more significant future decisions have you undermined by blowing your cognitive budget for the day on this one decision?
The same type of thinking should apply to 99% of our daily decisions.
Otherwise, we're constantly overwhelmed and waste our mental bandwidth on Maximizing, where it doesn't matter and where there are massive diminishing returns.
Whatever net benefit the most optimal type of peanut butter brings to your life is likely not worth the extra effort it took to find it.
It's unlikely that you're going to run to this chapter whenever you hit a fork in the road, but hopefully but hopefully, one or two lessons stick and you're able to make great decisions suited for you and no one else.
And that wraps up today's episode from Peter Holland's book, the Art of Strategic Decision making.
We'll cover the summary of that episode in just a moment.
Today we'll take just a moment to remember the Queen of Rock and Roll Tina Turner, who died yesterday at the age of 83 at her home in Switzerland.
She suffered in recent years from a stroke, from cancer and kidney failure, although the cause of death was not reported.
Born in Tennessee in 1939, she first rose to fame with the lead singer at the Ike and Tina Turner Review.
She left that group and the abusive relationship associated with it in 1976 and started her solo career.
In that career, she sold over 150,000,000 records, won twelve Grammy Awards and was inducted twice into the hall of Fame, once with icontina Turner and once as a solo artist.
At 44, she became the oldest female solo artist to top the Billboard Hot 100 list in 1984 with What's Love Got to Do With It?
And now a short recap of the takeaways from today's episode.
We are always battling our laziness in all aspects of life with decisions.
Implementing a simple checklist of sorts can help.
First travel into the future with the 1010 Rule.
This implores you to consider three different timelines in the future and how you'll feel about your decisions at those three points.
That is, ten minutes, ten days and ten months from now.
Ideally, you want all three timelines to be positive.
If not, can you live with the informed decision that one timeline might be negative or detrimental?
This technique will help you play out decisions in your mind, rather than focusing only on immediate results.
Another mental check in is to examine whether or not your options are in line with your worldview.
And this is accomplished by asking a series of questions that both alleviate you of your blind spots and make clear the reasons you have for engaging in certain actions.
There are few absolute, objectively good choices.
Rather, the right choice is the right choice for us relative to our values and goals.
Setting your own arbitrary boundaries can help with decisions because they narrow your options.
These give shape and structure to your decision making process.
You can set limits and use deal breakers or requirements.
They all work to clarify your intentions and work more quickly.
Look beyond pros and cons.
Making pro and con lists is usually inaccurate and too subjective, since there's no way to weigh up each item and we may be unconsciously biased one way or another.
Are you satisficing or unknowingly trying to maximize every decision you make?
99% of daily decisions don't require maximization and suffer greatly from the law of diminishing returns.
Satisficing a combination of satisfaction and sufficing is the key, and we wrap up today's episode with our comings and goings lists.
Today's birthdays.
Avery Gay, a millennial ballet dancer.
Chloe Lacasiac.
I probably pronounced that wrong.
Another dancer.
An actress.
Celian Murphy, an Irish born actor.
Mike Myers, the multitalented actor comedian.
Roman Reigns's birthday is today.
An undefeated wrestling champion.
And Thorgy Thor's birthday is today for you drag queen fans, although this is probably not celebrated in Florida on this day.
In 2020, George Floyd was killed by police during an arrest in Minneapolis, and in 18 three, Ralph Waldo Emerson was born.
Who better to quote than Ralph Waldo Emerson?
All life is an experiment.
The more experiments you make, the better.