Determine, Decide, and Live By
How the decisions we make build a path to better luck
This week’s Meditation at a glance:
We do not have control over all aspects of life but we do over our power to choose. The decisions we make therefore are critical to the outcome of our lives. This week we explore decision-making and how better decisions can lead to more luck.
“Some things in the world are up to us, while others are not. Up to us are our faculties of judgment - motivation, desire, and aversion - in short, everything that is our own doing. Not up to us are our body and property, our reputations, and our official positions - in short, everything that is not our own doing.”
-Epictetus, Enchiridion I
Much of our lives are outside of our control. Our power of choice therefore plays a vital role in how we can and will tackle life and the situations we come across. But how do we make proper choices? How do we use reason to determine the right path forward?
“Decisions are bets on the future,” writes the professional poker player and author , “and they aren't "right" or "wrong” based on whether they turn out well on any particular iteration. An unwanted result doesn't make our decision wrong if we thought about the alternatives and probabilities in advance and allocated our resources accordingly.”
Our decisions matter in what happens in our lives. We cannot control our lives completely, but we can provide as much assistance as possible to controlling outcomes within our lives by ensuring the quality of our decisions are the highest they can be.
Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky discovered that we have two systems when it comes to thinking and decision-making, what they called System 1 and System 2 thinking. System 1 thinking is rooted in evolution and is considered our automatic processing—we react. System 2 is slower, it focuses more on using rationality and reason to determine how best to proceed.
We only begin to discover the power of our decisions and how they dictate our lives when we stop to reflect on the choices we’ve actually been making. It is very easy for us to get into a groove of decision-making without even thinking about the decision we are making. These are habitual decisions that we’ve made many times before and therefore have now become automatic. The problem is we may in fact never question these decisions until something doesn’t go our way or there is a problem with the end result of that decision.
It may seem juvenile, but becoming aware of the decisions we’re making is in fact the first step to making better decisions.
While we have reason to drive our thinking, we are also riddled with issues that corrupt that thinking. We have shortcuts, what Kahneman and Tversky called heuristics, and biases that are constantly working in the background of our decision-making process. On top of this, we are always managing our emotional self and being motivated by the world we inhabit. When we reflect on our decision-making and the choices and outcomes of those choices, we need to reflect on these other aspects of our thinking as well. While it is impossible to drill down far enough to always know exactly why we made certain decisions, we can begin to make a mental picture of the decision-making process we inhabited by investigating our actions, our environment, and our own thought process.
Our lives are the sum of our actions. Or as Duke put it:
“The quality of our lives is the sum of decision quality plus luck.”
Once we begin to investigate the decisions we made and the outcome of those decisions, we can better see how certain actions led to certain results. We can see where luck played a role and how decision-making led to not only better outcomes but better chances for those outcomes.
Life will not always work out the way we want. We often have to accept the outcomes of life that do not go our way. But we can attempt to nudge these eventual outcomes in our favor by ensuring the quality of our decisions are as good as they can be in the moment and reflect on what went well and what didn’t after the fact.
“Don't ask for things to happen as you would like them to, but wish them to happen as they actually do, and you will be all right.”
Or to rephrase, you will be all right so long as you are using those moments to your advantage to grow, learn, and nudge fate to your future.
Three Bullet Summary:
We can control ourselves and the choices we make
We inherently have flaws in our thinking and therefore must reflect constantly on the decisions made
The quality of the choices we make will help to leverage luck, fortune, and fate to our favor - better choices, better luck
Thank you again for reading and I hope you found this useful. Please feel free to heart, comment, or ask questions about this post. Suggestions are always appreciated and considered.
Until next week,
D.A. DiGerolamo