By Chip Heath’s “Decisive”
To overcome short term emotions, we need to attain some distance.
- “When people share the worst decisions they’ve made in life, they are often recalling choices made in the grip of visceral emotion: anger, lust, anxiety, greed. Our lives would be very different if we had a dozen “undo” buttons to use in the aftermath of these choices.”
How to Attain Distance Before Making a Decision.
Literally attain some distance.
- “The millionaire teacher Hallam understood that if he got tempted into the lair of the car salesmen, he might get so enthused that he’d make a foolish purchase. So he plotted a way to avoid it. He added distance before deciding. In his case, the distance was literal—staying far away from the car lots. In general, the distance we need will be emotional. We need to downplay short-term emotion in favor of long-term values and passions.”
Use The 10/10/10 Rule.
- “To use 10/10/10, we think about our decisions on three different time frames: How will we feel about it 10 minutes from now? How about 10 months from now? How about 10 years from now?”
- “We asked Annie to try the 10/10/10 framework. Imagine that you resolve right now to tell him, this weekend, that you love him.
How would you feel about that decision 10 minutes from now? “I think I’d be nervous but proud of myself for taking the risk and putting myself out there.”
How would you feel about it 10 months from now? “I don’t think I’ll regret this. I don’t. I mean, obviously, I really would like this to work. I think he’s great. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, right?”
How about 10 years from now? Annie said that, regardless of how he’d reacted, it probably wouldn’t matter very much after a decade. By then they’d either be happily together or she would be in a happy relationship with someone else.”
Ask Yourself, “What advice would I give my best friend?”
- “Perhaps the most powerful question for resolving personal decisions is “What would I tell my best friend to do in this situation?”
- “The advice we give others, then, has two big advantages: It naturally prioritizes the most important factors in the decision, and it downplays short-term emotions. That’s why, in helping us to break a decision logjam, the single most effective question may be: What would I tell my best friend to do in this situation?”
- “when we’re giving advice, we find it easier to focus on the most important factors. So when we are advising a friend, we think, Job B is going to make her happier and more satisfied over the long term. It seems relatively simple. But when we think about ourselves, we let complexity intrude. Wait, wouldn’t it disappoint Dad if I gave up the prestige of Job A?”
- “our advice to others tends to hinge on the single most important factor, while our own thinking flits among many variables. When we think of our friends, we see the forest. When we think of ourselves, we get stuck in the trees.“
- “Andrew Grove, the CEO of Intel, had a tough time deciding if Intel should focus on memories or microprocessors. Intel had huge success with memories, but the future could be about microprocessors. Should Intel give up memories and focus on microprocessors? Grove agonized over this decision. He gave himself distance. He asked himself “What would our successors do?” He choose microprocessors and the rest is history.”
Beware of Loss Aversion
- “Our decisions are often altered by two subtle short-term emotions: (1) mere exposure: we like what’s familiar to us; and (2) loss aversion: losses are more painful than gains are pleasant.”
- “How many of our organizational truths are ideas that we like merely because they’ve been repeated a lot?”
- “Students given a mug won’t sell it for less than $7.12, even though five minutes earlier they wouldn’t have paid more than $2.87!”
- “Loss aversion + mere exposure = status-quo bias.”
- “PayPal: Ditching the PalmPilot product was a no-brainer—but it didn’t feel that way.”
We can attain distance by looking at our situation from an observer’s perspective
- Andy Grove asked, “What would our successors do?”
- “Adding distance highlights what is most important; it allows us to see the forest, not the trees.”