Making a Decision

The life skill that will make or break you is making good decisions. Consider Goldilocks. She spent a lot of time deciding if a bowl of porridge was too hot, too cold, or just right. She was so obsessed with cooking temperature that she never even considered that breaking and entering is a crime. And breaking and entering a home owned by wild bears? That’s just dumb.

When I was a student at MIT, I discovered that each dorm had its own personality. We spent the first week of the year giving incoming students tours and feeding them lobster, all to persuade the ones we liked to come live with us. 

“Baker House has nicer rooms,” an incoming frosh would say. 

“Choose the house where you feel most comfortable.” I replied. “Of course, your choice will determine who you become as a person, and set the stage for your entire life. But don’t think about that. Here, have some lobster.”

A decision’s consequences start now and go on forever. But when we make decisions, we usually only use a single time frame for considering the consequences. Good decisions require using a time frame that matches the decision, not a time frame that matches whatever time frame you happen to use.

Temptation Has a Time Horizon

Too short a time horizon is when we consider consequences into the next few minutes, weeks, or months,. But a decision’s Really Big Consequences may be years away. Choosing a living group at the most formative time in your life based on tonight’s lobster dinner? That’s too short a time horizon.

When that slice of J.P. Licks’s Oreo Ice Cream Cake beckons, you (and by “you,” I mean “I”) think only of that moment of tasty awesomeness, and not the 3 weeks of cardio it will take to work it off. 

Resist temptation by consciously and vividly imagining the unpleasant, far future consequences. Imagine them as big and bright as the temptation. Resisting will be much easier, and you can just send that Oreo Ice Cream cake to me.

Short Term Discomfort Motivates Short-Term Decisions

In my coaching practice, Ive found that clients’ bad decisions often come from using the wrong time horizon. One client took a job she knew was a bad fit. “It’s my only offer, so I have to take it!” she explained. Bad decision! To relieve her short-term job anxiety now, she created a long-term cauldron of stress, spending years in a job she hated. Most people would rather cut a stressful job hunt short by taking a job that makes their life a living Heck than extend the job hunt and find a job that’s such a good fit they keep it for years. The short-term overwhelms the long-term.

Pair your short-term decisions with contingency plans for the long-term!

You’ll also find the short-term driving other common decisions: hiring to fill a need now  when the candidate is a poor fit long-term. Polluting a little bit, for now, when that pollution will accumulate, causing serious problems down the line. And being just a tad unethical, because it’s “just this once.” Without realizing that “just this once” easily becomes a slippery slope.

Pair your short-term decisions with a contingency plan for long-term consequences! Trial periods for new hires are a contingency plan to fill a current need without committing to long-term mis-fit. Having pollution licenses that must be re-evaluated and renewed would be a good contingency plan for allowing short-term polluters, if they were properly enforced (don’t hold your breath). And a Cayman Islands vacation home is a great contingency plan if you decide to ski down that ethical slippery slope.

Sometimes We Think Too Far Ahead

You can also think too long-term as well. Many entrepreneurs build companies without knowing how they’ll make money. They think, “Ten years from now, we’ll have it all figured out.” But if they have no plan for surviving from now until that decade is up, they’ll run out of cash now and go belly up.

High achievers often focus too far ahead. They work too much, and ignore their families, hobbies, friends, and lives. Why? For that next promotion. Or to plan for retirement. Or to send the kids to college. Or to build up a nest egg that will someday hatch into a 12-foot tall cybernetic ostrich with super powers they’ll use to take over the world.

In this case, they’re so focused on preparing for the future that they’re missing the now. They could have a happy life with their family now. They could teach the kids to help raise their own college money, now. They could have hobbies and friends and lives now. I’m not so sure about the cybernetic ostrich, however.

Decisions based solely on the long-term may expose you to too much short-term risk. They can also blind you to noticing that most of what you want, you could already have if you weren’t ignoring the short-term. This is the whole premise behind my Living an Extraordinary Life presentation—it’s about setting long-term direction, but enjoying the short-term while you’re on the way.

When you are concentrating solely on the long-term, stop and take a look at the short-term and the present. You may already be able to get what you want. And make sure you have a short-term survival plan that will tide you over until the long-term arrives. That’s survival in every sense—financial, physical, social, and emotional.

Consider All Timeframes When Deciding

When making a decision, you want to be like Goldilocks: consider the decision using a timeframe that’s very short. Then reconsider with a timeframe that’s very long. Using that information, consider a third time, with a timeframe that’s just right. Then you’ll know if you want to have a contingency plan for the long term, a survival plan for the short term, or whether your time horizon is Just Right.

Decisions image courtesy of Shutterstock.