back and make the decision “rationally.” Put your emotions off to one side and adopt a detached, scientific point of view. Find an engineering method, a design model, or some technique that will allow you to self-distance. Grab a legal pad. Write out a list of costs and benefits down either side.
By approaching the decision rationally, scientifically, you can break the decision-making down into clear stages. Decision-making experts fill books with clear decision stages: preparation (identify the problem; determine your objectives), search (assemble a list of the possible jobs or people that will help you meet your objectives), evaluation (make a chart and rate the options on a ten-point scale according to various features), confrontation (ask disconfirming questions; create constructive disagreement to challenge existing premises), selection (tally up the scores; build a consequences table that will help you envision the future outcome of each choice).
If you follow this kind of formal methodology, you will certainly be able to apply some useful frameworks. For example, when you are considering quitting your job, apply the 10-10-10 rule. How will this decision feel in 10 minutes, 10 months, and 10 years? That will help you put the short-term emotional pain of any decision in the context of long-term consequences.
When buying a house, look at eighteen houses on the market without making a decision about any of them. Then make an offer on the next home that is better than the first eighteen. That will ensure that you have a fair sample of what’s out there before making any choice.
Rational techniques are all designed to counteract our cognitive biases. For example, people tend to “narrow frame.” As the management experts Chip and Dan Heath argue, they try to turn every open-ended question into a “whether or not” question, or an “either-or” question. People unconsciously think of decisions as a choice between two options. Should I take this job or not? Should I break up with Sue or not? In most key decision moments, there are actually many more options that are being filtered out by that point of view. Every time you find yourself saying “whether or not,” the Heaths argue, it’s a good idea to step back and find more options. Maybe the question is not breaking up with Sue or not; it’s finding a new way to improve your relationship.
YOUR DAEMON
The rational process seems so foolproof. Unfortunately, when it comes to making the big-commitment decisions in life, it, too, is insufficient. The first problem is the one described at the start of this chapter. You can have no data on what your transformed self will want, so you can’t rationally think it through by tallying up the evidence. The second problem is that when you’re making a decision about a big commitment, you are making a decision about the ultimate moral purpose and meaning of your life.
Logic can’t help much with these ultimate questions. Logic is really good when the ends of a decision are clear, when you are playing a game with a defined set of rules. When you buy a toaster, you want a machine that will heat up bread. But commitment decisions are not like that. When making a commitment decision, defining the purpose of your life is the biggest part of the problem. That’s a matter of the ultimate horizon. The question What is my ultimate good? is a different kind of question than How can I win at Monopoly?
If you go to the career-advice gurus to find your vocation, the question many will put at the center of your search is “What is my talent?” One of the central preoccupations in the career-advice world is helping people identify strengths and then helping them figure out how to exploit them. One of the implications here is that in selecting a career path, talent should trump interest. If you are really interested in art but you’re not actually that good at it, you’ll wind up at some boring design job for a company you don’t care about at the bottom of the profession. When making a vocational choice ask, What am I talented at?
That may be fine if you’re willing to settle for something meager like a career. But if you are trying to discern your vocation, the right question is not What am I good at? It’s the harder questions: What am I motivated to do? What activity do I love so much that I’m going to keep getting better at it for the next many