A lot of life is about managing focus, the battle between breadth and depth. If we take every opportunity that comes our way, we’re left with too little time and energy to make a meaningful impact on any of those opportunities, but if we put all of our eggs in one basket, we may be exposing ourselves to too much variance.
Another example of this balance is in making decisions. With too many options on the table, we can paralyze ourselves with choice. With too few options under active consideration, we may not even be considering our best ones. Too often, this is our problem.
Frequently you’ll see someone deliberating as if he has only two choices. Go to this school, or go to that school. Stay at the job or quit the job. Move back home or stay in an expensive city. Vote republican or democrat.
For small decisions, considering just a few options is likely to be the best choice. You like chicken and you like beef, so you choose one from the menu rather than giving each menu item its own moment of silent contemplation. And even for big decisions, ending up with two choices to decide between makes a lot of sense. The problem is when big decisions start with only a few choices.
In reality, we have infinite choices at any given time. You could go to this school, or you could go to that school. You could also not go to school, take a year off to travel, get an apprenticeship, take a year off to start a business, go to community college and start a business on the side, or move to Hawaii to protect sea turtles.
That’s not to say that all of these choices are equally good, or equally safe, or equally likely to pacify your parents. Some of them are probably downright terrible ideas. But it’s only through consideration that you can make that decision on an individual basis.
This process of careful consideration is what made me decide that not wasting four years doing something I’m not interested in is worth some potential uncertainty and parental disapproval. For others it may have the opposite effect, causing them to decide that spending four years on something they’re not completely sure about is worth it for the familial harmony and space to figure out what they want to do next.
The point isn’t that one decision is better than the other, it’s that we need to be responsible for our own decisions in order to make good ones. The dangerous part about rushing to eliminate options is that the choices that we eliminate before really even thinking are those that require a lot of responsibility. It takes courage and responsibility to skip school and start a business or move to Hawaii. For those in socio-economic groups where college is seen as beyond reach, it takes courage and responsibility to decide you’re going to figure out a way to be the first of your friends and family to go.
By failing to consider these non-obvious options, you are literally living an average life: one made by decisions that are the average of all decisions made by people in similar situations. That’s what norms are, and norms become the obvious choices. Choosing between two similar options with similar risk profiles is more like choice-simulation than actual choice (just like national elections, for the most part).
Walking down an unusual path requires a lot of confidence. It may appear that those who choose these paths are more confident by nature, but I don’t think that’s the entire story. One major source of confidence is knowing that you’ve been thorough, soberly examining a wide range of options, and eventually making the one that’s likely to be best for you as an individual. Once the first decision or two works out well, you gain a tremendous wave of confidence, knowing that you went against popular opinion and were right.
Next time you have a big decision to make, remember to take a look at all of your options, not just the obvious one. You could do what’s expected of you, but you could also become an artist, buy a one-way ticket to Thailand, start a business, write a book, buy some cheap land in Arizona and build your own house, live in an RV, or move to California because it’s always nice there. To say that there are no limits would be disingenuous, but most of those limits are artificial limits we place on ourselves. The rest are interesting challenges to be attacked.
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I looked up Tynan.com on Alexa for the first time in a year or so to find that I finally made it to the top 100k sites in the world. Awesome!
Photo is the view from the top of Genoa, Italy.
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