You look around and you see people facing these sorts of transformational decisions and screwing it up big-time. More than a third of all marriages end in divorce. We all know people who waste years following career paths that don’t satisfy them. Eighty-three percent of all corporate mergers fail to create any value for shareholders, and these mergers are only made after months and years of analysis. When making the big choices in life, as L. A. Paul puts it, “You shouldn’t fool yourself—you have no idea what you are getting into.”
No wonder so many people have commitment phobia. No wonder some people are so paralyzed by the big choices that they just sort of sleepwalk through them. The paradox of life is that people seem to deliberate more carefully over the little choices than the big ones. Before buying a car, they read all the ratings, check out resale values on the Internet, and so on. But when it comes to choosing a vocation, they just sort of slide rather than decide. They slide incrementally into a career because someone gave them a job. They marry the person whom they happen to be living with. For many, the big choices in life often aren’t really choices; they are quicksand. You just sink into the place you happen to be standing.
“It is remarkable that I am never quite clear about the motives for any of my decisions,” the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer once admitted. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, two of the greatest psychologists of all time, spent their entire careers studying decision-making. But if you asked them about the decision that got them into psychology in the first place, they could barely tell you. “It’s hard to know how people select a course in life,” Tversky once said. “The big choices we make are practically random.”
So how do you make these big decisions? How do you decide what career to go into, what person to marry, where to live, how to spend your retirement?
Some people rely on the “You Just Know” model. When the right thing comes along, you get a feeling and you just know. T. D. Jakes says life is like having a big ring of keys, and there’s a single lock that is your best life. You try some of the keys and eventually you get to one that feels different. As soon as you put it in the keyhole, before you even turn it, you feel a whoosh and you know it’s right.
There’s some wisdom in this method. There are some situations in which people make better decisions when they have less time to think. But there’s not enough wisdom here. Are you really going to bet your life on a momentary feeling? On an intuition?
For one thing, intuitions are unstable. Feelings are usually fleeting and sometimes inexplicable in the days or even minutes after you feel them. I was recently up for a job, and during the competition to get it I invented all sorts of reasons why I would enjoy the job, which was mostly fundraising and administration. Then, when I didn’t get the job, I felt a huge surge of relief: What was I thinking? I’m a middle-aged man and apparently I have no clue about who I really am.
Second, our intuitions frequently lead us astray. Kahneman and Tversky, along with many other behavioral economists, have filled books and books with all the ways our intuitions can betray us—loss aversion, priming effects, the halo effect, the optimism bias, and so forth. I have friends who have gone six months thinking that such and such a person is the love of their life and then the next four decades thinking that person was an absolute disaster. As George Eliot once put it, “Men and women make sad mistakes about their own symptoms, [mistaking] their vague uneasy longings, sometimes for genius, sometimes for religion, and oftener still for a mighty love.”
Finally, intuition is reliable only in certain sorts of decisions. “Intuition” is a fancy word for pattern recognition. It can be trusted only in domains in which you have a lot of experience, in which the mind has time to master the various patterns. But when you are making a transformational choice, you are leaping into an unknown territory. You don’t know the patterns there. Intuition can’t tell you. It’s just guessing.
THE RATIONAL FABLE
The seemingly better method, especially in our culture, is to step