Too Many Options Reduce Your Effectiveness
Decision-making can prove very hard to do because it usually involves cutting off other options, which can lead to loss and that’s something that we seem to be hard wired to prevent. However, not making decisions can also cause invisible losses and so it’s important for you to be aware of what’s going on and how to make difficult decisions easier to take.
Normally we hate to close the door on potential options. We are creatures descended from a long line of predecessors who survived by living in the lowest risk fashion possible. We gather as many resources as we can to make survival more likely and we hate to cut off any potential option that might one day prove to be our salvation.
Having lots of options, or potential resources, available instinctively pleases us. A lack of options can lead to desperate circumstances and that truly puts all of us on edge. Sometimes though, deliberately cutting off options can lead to a grimly focused and determined state of mind. There is a story of Hernan Cortes, the conqueror of the Aztecs, which says that after his men and supplies had landed he burned his ships so that they had no option of retreat. They would either succeed or perish. To cut off all other options is brave, if you win, and foolhardy, if you perish. It’s not something to engage in, unless to hesitate and flounder ends up guaranteeing your defeat anyway.
By taking up many options and by preserving the option to take unused opportunities, we can end up doing ourselves a disservice. By running around from one activity to the next, we easily end up distracted, divided, unable to concentrate and rarely able to finish anything. This is a particular problem in today’s modern age, as the options available to us have become never ending. In the fear of missing out on good things we miss out on doing things well.
When it proves difficult to make a choice and to give something up then applying the principle of non-linearity (80/20 principle) can have a big impact on assessing the true and relative merits of one option against another. The principle of non-linearity tells us that a large proportion of what we spend our time upon and what we devote our efforts to actually has a very minimal payoff in terms of results and satisfaction. We can look at all of our activities and decide which ones give too little reward for the effort needed. By gaining an accurate perspective of how these things prevent us from achieving more and having greater satisfaction elsewhere, we can cut these out fairly easily.
I use the 80/20 rule when making difficult purchasing decisions, especially for gadgets and services with lots of complicated option permutations. It is easy to get distracted by all of the bells and whistles and coming up with the perfect combination can take hours, if such a perfect combination even exists. At this point I get back to basics and focus on the functionality that I want. With most gadgets and services, you end up using 20% of the functions, 80% of the time. For me, in the case of a mobile phone, that’s phoning, texting, storing numbers and using the alarm clock. Any phone that does that will satisfy me.
As another example, I recently bought a Dyson vacuum cleaner. I got hold of a brochure and price list and I went through all of the options attempting to get the perfect combination. I couldn’t find such a combination, or else I had to spend a lot more money to get most of the functions that appealed to me, plus extra ones of no appeal. I ground to a halt with my decision making process, so I got back to basics. I realized that 80% or more of the functionality and value of the Dyson cleaner lies in the basic design principles and in the quality of the manufacture. Those features are present across the entire range of products, so I opted to buy the base model with no frills. It was about 25% cheaper and yet contained all of the principle benefits. I’m still delighted with it.
For the bigger impact choices, we again need to assess the relative effects of effort versus reward. It is likely though, that we will have some options that we find hard to cut off, either because we have emotional attachment to them or because we are uncertain which choice will finally yield the best result. At this point it is important to accept that we cannot know the future and that a potential loss might occur. By weighing up the pros and cons it is sometimes possible to find a clearly better option, but not always. Our desires, and the respondent emotions that they create, can sway our rational assessment of issues. We can factor this in and accept that it is better to commit to something that has a greater desire value (and hence emotional and finally satisfactory value), than the logically better but less desirable option.
Finally, an option must be chosen and the other one discarded, even if it is promising, because to divide yourself between both of them actually jeopardizes both of them.
In the past, I used to dally over such decisions and would end up committing to nothing, which just resulted in time passing by (with inherent frustration and a sense of loss). The answer for me was to care less about results and to care more and more about the process of what it takes to set a desire and to do all of the things necessary to deliver that desire. The whole process of problem solving, in its entirety, from starting to fulfill a desire through to final fulfillment, is the ultimate capability to have. Once you’ve mastered that, then almost all other options that you want to take can become possible for you (assuming that they are not age or physiologically dependent). Once you have that capability, then you can pick up new activities with great speed, precision and excellent results. It is so much better to commit to one thing now, so that you can do and have much more later, than it is to attempt many things now and end up with poor quality results across the board.
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#1 - Permalink Chris July 1st, 2008 at 1:28 amI learned this the hard way. I would take opportunities left and right, whether or not I had any required skills.
Can’t wait for the book!