- Throughout our lives,
we learn difficult lessons,
such as don't believe something
just because your parents said it was true,
don't take a job just because you make more money,
don't date somebody
just 'cause they fuck you like a porn star,
don't start a land war in Russia.
These are all things that we need to know
to get through life in one piece.
That's why this video
is dedicated to learning how to make better decisions.
And you could start
by deciding to subscribe and like this video.
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Our understanding of human decision-making
has evolved a lot
over the millennia.
The ancients believe that
your decisions were mostly based on your inherent character.
You were either born a piece of shit
and did piece of shit things
or you're born virtuous
and did virtuous things.
Later on in the middle ages,
people's decisions were seen as a cosmic struggle
between good and evil.
People believed that angels and demons and spirits
would take control of people and
force them to do horrible things or great things.
It wasn't until the enlightenment
that personal agency started to figure into these things.
People realize like,
oh, hey,
people have free will.
They can do whatever they want,
they can choose to be good and evil,
they can change as life goes on.
These ideas particularly started with the work of John Locke
in the mid 1600s.
Locke said that we were born a blank slate
or tabula rasa.
He said that all of our experiences that happen to us
etch into our personality
what we will seek into the world.
So
if I
grow up to be a total shit for brains,
that's probably because, you know,
my parents were shit for brains or
the people around me were shit for brains.
Basically Locke correctly identified
that many of our values and beliefs
throughout our life
come from us from our environment.
But the ultimate philosophical fuck fest of personal agency
came from everybody's favorite capitalist, Adam Smith.
It was with the rise of capitalism and international trade
that people really started to understand that
individual motives and decisions
when taken in aggregate
can be better for all.
Early economists began to see society
in terms of everybody making individual decisions
based on rational cost and benefit.
Everything became an economic decision.
The choice to leave my hometown and go live in the big city
became an economic decision.
Are the benefits better than the costs?
So the prevailing view was that ultimately
everybody behaves in a rational and competent manner.
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This idea that
everybody is quietly
subconsciously weighing the cost and benefits in our head
is something that's known
as cognitive cost benefit analysis.
It's very simple.
Like, let's say I'm laying on my couch
and my trash is overflowing.
I don't wanna fucking take out the trash, that's a drag.
So in my head,
there's little scale that's going on.
Benefit of sitting on the couch all day,
benefit of taking out the trash.
Which one weighs more?
Now,
everybody has a different threshold
where at some point
the garbage starts to stink,
starts to make your household smelly,
you start to get really annoyed at yourself,
feel like a waste of a human being
and suddenly the scales tip,
and you get off your ass
and you take the garbage out.
You can visualize most basic human behaviors in this manner.
The problem is,
is when you get some major life decisions.
Let's say I'm trying to decide whether I'm gonna
quit my job as a writer and
become a monk for the next five years.
I can kinda do the cost and benefit thing,
but the problem is is that the repercussions are so massive
and so ambiguous,
it's impossible to objectively know,
like, what is the value
of quitting my career?
What is the value of
moving to a cave and staring at a wall
for the next five years?
What is the cost?
We don't really know.
We vaguely know,
we think we know,
but we are very bad at extrapolating large scale events
over long periods of time
or events that have vast repercussions
for the rest of our life.
So it was around the 1970s and 1980s
that economists and psychologists started to finally
pick up on this.
They're like, wait a second,
this shit's actually really hard to judge.
It turns out that humans are terrible at predicting
the actual costs and benefits to their actions.
We are consistently wrong at guessing
how things are gonna make us feel.
Things that we think are gonna make us really happy,
turn out to only make us a little bit happy.
Things that we think are gonna make us miserable,
turn out to not really make us miserable.
Things that we think are gonna be okay
end up being the best thing that we ever did in our lives.
And so in this sense,
it becomes very, very hard
to gauge accurately
what a good decision is going to be for ourselves.
What these psychologists discovered
is that we're basically all operating on a best guess
pretty much all the time,
and a huge part of this
is because we are easily swayed
by various biases and prejudices.
Or take, for example,
every Christmas shopping season on Black Friday,
there are videos
of people fist fighting in Walmart
over like toasters and televisions.
I mean, what the fuck?
What toaster is worth getting clocked in the eye for?
So this is one of those cases where
it took science like 300 years to catch up the common sense.
Of course, people behave irrationally,
of course we spend money on stupid shit,
of course we have no idea what's
actually gonna make us happy and what's not.
Even low stakes decisions about
business or career or whatever,
we'll be petrified.
I spent two years
thinking about starting this YouTube channel.
I've been on television multiple times,
I've done hundreds and hundreds of interviews,
I've been on camera,
I even owned the equipment for like six months
and I didn't fucking do anything.
Why?
I don't know, I was just always making up reasons.
Ah, I'm too busy,
ah, I don't know what to say,
ah, nobody's gonna watch me.
It's just stupid.
I was anxious,
I was nervous.
It was a new thing,
it was challenging,
I didn't know if it was gonna work,
but when I sat down
and actually thought through things strategically,
remove my own emotions from the situation,
I'm like, yeah,
there's no reason not to do this.
Why are you whining and freaking out and
making noises.
Maybe people will see that I talk to myself.
Well, what's wrong with talking to yourself, Mark?
I don't know, you've talked to yourself all the time.
I mean, writing is kind of a form of talking to yourself,
you do that all the time.
Yeah, and people seem to like that,
what's your problem?
What's your problem?
Fuck you.
Where was I?
Ultimately economics was right.
We do have this balance scale in our head.
The problem is,
is that we're not objective about what goes on each side.
Our emotions and our biased perceptions
put a finger
on the scale on each side in different ways.
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So the first thing to understand
is how those biases and prejudices
weigh on our mind,
how our perceptions of things get slanted,
how we get messed up and misjudge
what is actually involved in a decision.
So there are a few books
that I really encourage you to check out
that can teach you these kinds of things,
that help you understand how your mind is just
messing these calculations up all the time.
The first one is called "Predictably Irrational"
by Dan Ariely.
The book is full of fascinating experiments where subjects
consistently make poor choices
simply by altering
how a menu is laid out,
or if the more expensive prices
are at the top versus the bottom.
There are all sorts of subtle things like this that affect
our sense that something is cheap or expensive.
There's another great book called "Influence"
by Robert Cialdini.
It shows you
all the ways that we are persuaded and manipulated
into thinking things are better than they actually are.
There's one interesting experiment in the book
where they found that
people who cut in line
piss everybody off.
I mean, fuck line cutters, right?
But
people who cut in line
and then give a reason for cutting and in line,
people don't get mad at them
even if the reason makes absolutely no sense.
So in the experiment,
they had people cut in line for something
and then turn around and say, "Oh, I'm sorry,
my dog died last week."
And people were like,
"All right, yeah, go ahead."
What the fuck?
Another great book,
one of my personal favorites is "Stumbling on Happiness"
by Daniel Gilbert.
"Stumbling on Happiness"
has all of this interesting research around emotion,
how we misremember our emotions,
how we predict our emotions poorly,
how we think we were way more upset last year
'cause dad missed our birthday than we actually were,
how we predict we're gonna be way more upset this year
when dad misses our birthday.
Stop missing my birthday dad.
And then finally
the classic by the Nobel Laureate
"Thinking Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman.
It is
a dense,
comprehensive look
at many of the cognitive biases and heuristics that
fuck us up in our decision-making
and
it's eyeopening to say the least.
So that's the first step,
is to educate yourself on how your mind fucks up.
(upbeat music)
Step two is to utilize some tools
to help you become more rational,
to help you externalize your thought process
so that you can remove those emotional forces
that are putting their finger on the scale.
The easiest way to do that
is to write stuff down.
There's something about writing your thoughts down,
that forces you to look at them as if they're not your own.
So anytime in my life when I have a major decision to make,
I just start writing about it.
I start writing about
my thought process,
I start
explaining all the evidence,
all the reasons why I wanna make this decision,
and sure enough,
pretty much every single time
I find that I'm overestimating things,
I find I'm underestimating things.
Another way to do this obviously
is to find an advisor or a mentor
or somebody you look up to,
maybe even just a friend who
isn't afraid to tell you, you're an idiot
if you need to hear it.
Talk to them through your thought process,
and then actively ask them the challenge you on it.
And then the last strategy
is something a little bit less scientific but
also something that I feel pretty strongly about.
That is optimize your decisions for zero regrets.
Ultimately,
a lot of things
are impossible to know if they're a good thing or not.
But
if you ask yourself,
"Will I regret doing it or will I regret not doing it?"
That can often give you your answer.
Many years ago,
I had the opportunity to move to New York City.
It was a daunting choice.
I'd been living abroad for seven years,
I had just gotten engaged,
I wasn't sure if I wanted to live
in the United States anymore.
New York is really fucking expensive,
I wasn't sure if I could afford it.
I asked myself
20 years from now
if I don't do this,
will I regret it?
And the answer was, yeah,
I think I would always wonder what it would have been like
to live in New York city.
Then I asked myself if I moved to New York,
do I think I would regret it in 20 years?
And the answer is no.
Because if it sucks,
you just leave again.
Therefore it became clear that
moving to New York was the choice of minimal regret.
And that's a tool that I've used in
many of my major life decisions.
I've simply asked myself,
"Will I regret doing this
or will I regret not doing it?"
And 90% of the time
I would regret not doing it,
so I just do fucking it.
And that brings me
to the harsh truth of the day.
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The harsh truth of the day is that
even if you make great decisions,
you don't know that there are great decisions.
In the moment, every great decision
still feels really tenuous and scary.
You're full of doubt,
you don't know
if it's gonna work out or not.
I think there's this idea that
the right decision,
it pops up and you're like, oh my God, it's like
the fucking clouds part,
and it's like,
this is the answer to everything.
That never happens.
Good decisions,
especially the best decisions,
the reason they're the best decisions
is because it's so difficult to see
what the correct move is.
So in that sense,
the best decision should be scary,
it should feel uncomfortable,
it should push your boundaries a little bit,
because that's part of what makes it the best decision.
It's a signal of the significance of the moment.
So don't look for decisions
that feel comfortable and feel easy,
look for the decisions that inspire the doubt,
that inspire the insecurity,
'cause that's where the real shit is.
So like this video,
subscribe to it,
and post in the comments,
what decision are you struggling with?
And who knows,
maybe you'll get an answer.
Till next time,
Manson out.
(rock music)