Every Moment Presents a Choice

The new year is upon us.

But today, rather than reflect on the prior year or plans for the future, I think we could use a reminder of a power we have always had.

That is the power to choose the direction of our lives, every moment of every day.

Sure, there is a life path we have found ourselves on through having created it, stumbled upon it, or found ourselves in it through necessity.

For better or worse, this is the reality of our lives.

Yet we always have choices.

A thought that has occurred to me is that many of us don’t truly understand the number of choices available to us in a given day.

Consider this: A dear friend once criticized me upon realizing that in a day we spent together, he had made every decision about what we did. He got tired of it, and he asked me:

Have you even made a single choice today?

His question made me realize that every moment of that day had presented me with a choice. I could go along the easy route with the path unfolding before me, or I could fight against it.

Neither way is necessarily better than the other, but that is the key, predominant choice of our lives. Flow along with the stream of destiny, or work to create your own path.

I explained to my friend that I had made countless choices that day, all of which involved doing what he wanted to do and spending time with him. Even in that moment of discussion, I had chosen to continue our conversation rather than part ways.

Every moment is a choice.

It so happens that with me, when everything is going well, I don’t fight the path in front of me. I allow it to unfold as it does, to take me where it flows, but I am still choosing that.

But what about when your life’s path presents more and more obstacles, and you dread what lies ahead?

In such cases, we must use the power we have to make a choice.

Even if you made a mistake, and for 100 moments in a day, you chose to continue along a futile, unrewarding, miserable path, you still have the power at any moment to change that.

Every moment of every day gives you the opportunity to change it all around.

Even when it comes to mental states – if, in the course of a day, you find yourself unhappy and bored, you can ask what choices led you to that. And if you make new choices in a different direction, can you begin to find the happiness and stimulation that you need?

Taking things further, even our beliefs about ourselves or the world, and thus the emotional states that may follow can be a choice.

Here is a belief some people may hold:

I believe I have little power, and my life’s path has been decided by my parents, the government, or society.

The issue with that belief would be that it completely nullifies your ability to choose your life’s path. If you are willing to accept your power of choice in every moment of every day and do something with it, then you have that power in you.

However, if you are not willing to accept that you have that power, then you do not have it. You have taken your own power away, then.

Consider this: How many choices or opportunities for change do we get in the course of a day?

Let’s say a moment is equal to a second. Then that would mean that in your waking hours, or 16 hours, there are 57,600 moments where you can make a choice. That is quite a few….

Those are 57,600 opportunities where you can choose to continue along a path or to seek a new one. To use your own judgment or pursue a mentor to guide you. To rely on the same habitual ways of believing and behaving or to pave a new path of being. To value time and use it wisely, or waste it on nonsense. To help yourself or another, or help no one.

Even to reflect on your choices or not, or to write down what you have learned or not are choices you get to make.

The choices are seemingly infinite. Yet there is always a choice.

Of course, it’s easier to blame others and say they are at fault for the setbacks in our lives. And perhaps other people are at fault, to some extent. But complaining, obsessing, or stressing about that does nothing for your progress.

In fact, if you get hung up on how others are at fault, you are the one who has chosen to delay your own life’s progress.

So, of course, we must avoid that and accept our power to choose every moment of every day.

How can you use your power of choice?:

When your time is being wasted, with nothing to gain from it, choose to use it on something more beneficial. Or at least decide to avoid such wasted time in the future.

When you are disrespected and unappreciated, choose to pursue better people to spend your time with.

When you have been treated unjustly, choose to speak up rather than ignore the issue.

When you have made horrible mistakes, choose to learn and improve.

When someone needs help, choose to help if you can.

Choose to see the good in people and situations and not just the bad that is there.

Some of us who do not use our power of choice may not know what we want. In that case, we should reflect on what we believe to be truly important.

For example: Family, Peace, Success, Love, Happiness, Mastery, Knowledge, Awareness, Service, Giving, Truth, and so on. What is most important to you?

Then ask, are your choices helping you to create the life you ultimately want to live? And are you taking advantage of all the choices available to you at every moment in time?

Of course, the point here is not to get overwhelmed with so many choices, as who really needs 57,600 choices? The point is this:

Realize that every moment of your life is a moment of true possibility, where your life can begin to unfold in a new direction of your choosing.

What better time to reflect on that, and to truly understand it and make it a way of life, than the new year, here and now….

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The Problem with Solutions

The problem with solutions is that they are all temporary fixes. No problem has ever been permanently fixed.

Don’t think in the span of a year or ten years, or even a human lifetime. Think longer. What has been permanently fixed?

In the end, the “solutions” we come up with lead to more problems. We often hear that “No one could have predicted the new problems that would arise from implementing a given solution.” It’s true, except that there always seem to be some unforeseen issues that arise.

In a paradoxical sense, the unforeseeable is foreseeable. It’s almost certain that some negative effect will come out of resolving a problem. We just don’t know what it will be.

People sometimes ask me for help with their problems. I try to help, but my power is limited.

The issue is that for any solution I may give you to your problem, you will soon come back and tell me it didn’t work. You will need me to help modify the plan for you or help resolve new problems that have arisen due to fixing the prior ones.

You will also become reliant on someone else to resolve your problems for you. You will outsource your thinking and your being, looking for someone else to fix an unfixable problem, which is human life.

Human life, and what to do with this life, or how to fix any human issue, is an unfixable problem, as they all are. There is no permanent solution.

I believe a worthy path is to train the mind, to build it up to be able to handle a variety of situations, but even this does not offer a permanent solution to anything. The stronger your mind is, the more likely you will challenge yourself further and further, until you reach a wall. Then what?

Notice that people who have the “solutions” will continue to believe that they have them. When you don’t succeed or get the result you wanted, they will just say you didn’t apply the advice correctly. And that may be true. Perhaps you made some mistakes. But even if you apply all the advice correctly, eventually, it will not work. Give it time, and ultimately, you will find that advice disappointing. This is because we live in a changing reality.

The advice of a year ago is probably outdated already. And the advice everyone is following also loses its utility. For example, if a finance guru posts that you should invest in real estate right now, and his millions of followers read that advice and follow it, then the more people follow his advice, the more useless it will be. If everyone rushes to buy real estate, the prices will go up and up, making it a bad investment.

For the next piece of advice you receive, imagine if the whole world took that advice and realize that everything would collapse overnight if that happened. Then understand the futility of advice and the futility of “solutions.”

So when you realize that there is no solution to chase, what do you do then? You probably look for the solutions anyway, right? This is the human way. We won’t sit by and leave a problem alone. If a neighbor comes to me with a broken chair, I may help him fix it. But what if I make a mistake because I am not a professional, then the chair breaks under him, and he hurts his back. Then he goes to the chiropractor, which fixes his back and accidentally causes problems with his neck.

Then maybe he gets tired of the new problems caused by fixing the old ones, and he decides to live with his neck issues. In time, perhaps his neck gets better on its own.

You may say this is a pessimistic view that problems have no solutions. Maybe it is. Or perhaps it’s realistic. We are obsessed with problems and solutions. If someone gives me a problem, I usually know what to do – even if the thing to do is to ask another expert. But all of that problem-solving keeps us spinning our wheels, running in circles.

Today’s generation hopes to solve today’s problems and waits for the next generation to solve the new problems (unforeseeable ones) this generation will cause. This continues until the latest generation faces the current problems on top of problems that all the prior generations caused along the way.

At some point, there are too many problems to deal with.

Everyone that I know is a believer. Whether religious or not, they are believers. They believe in solutions. They think that the solution to the problem will fix something.

But the question isn’t really if the “solution” will work. It’s actually: when will it fail?

Consider that the “Solution” you have found may actually be the biggest problem of your life.

For example, someone prone to stress will resolve one stressor, only to have another one arise. They will find a technique that works to resolve the stress until it no longer works. They will remove themselves from a stressful situation, only to run into another one with new kinds of stresses. Stress is just used as an example here, but the problem could be anything. Given time, the solutions fail, and we chase more and more solutions.

The problem with solutions is that we become fixated on resolving one particular issue, forgetting about the larger context. Any fool can fix a specific problem and create a hundred new ones in the process. And this is what we tend to do.

Humans are masterful problem-solvers but even more skillful at creating problems.

The real problem is that we are conditioned to expect solutions all around us. We expect someone to give us an action plan to resolve everything rather than using the power of the mind. We want rote, formulaic solutions to a dynamic world that doesn’t care about our procedures.

When I talk to people in customer service and come to them with a problem, I find them behaving like robots. I get responses like “That’s not how we were trained,” “This has never happened before,” and “No one has ever asked.” They might as well say “Does not compute,” as perhaps a robot would.

The problem with solutions is that we only tend to have them for easy, direct problems and have forgotten how to seek them out on the challenging problems we face.

The challenging problems were unexpected, unpredictable, unforeseen. Yet, at the same time, it should be quite obvious that things that have never happened in the past sometimes do occur in the future. However, we behave as if that is an impossibility.

Our go-to solutions are designed to handle problems that have happened in the past, not new ones which may occur in the future. This is practical in the short run but leaves us with calamity in the long run.

However, trying to resolve the problems that have never happened and may never happen can also be a loser’s game. You can spend all your life preparing to resolve a perceived problem that may never happen. So that is not the solution either.

I am not saying we should be happy doing nothing, allowing problems to build up, and taking no action to resolve them. I am not saying we should stay on the course of perpetually “solving” problems without actually fixing anything.

I am asking you to be mindful that just because you fixed ten problems in one day, this is nothing to be proud of. For resolving 10, you may have caused 100 new ones.

The story of humanity is that we are excellent at resolving short-term problems, only to create more of them. But if we think deeply, perhaps we have never solved a single problem permanently.

Ask yourself: What problem have human societies truly solved? And what problems have we created?

Consider this: Even if we fixed all human problems, that would still introduce a new problem. What do you do with human life when there is no apparent problem to focus on? Starvation, homelessness, illness, social needs, etc., have all been resolved in this theoretical utopia.

You may see where this is going, but perhaps this utopic vision is a dystopia because no one would have any purpose or any problem to work on. Society would quickly degenerate and crumble, and we would once again have an abundance of problems.

The state of having no problems ultimately results in a plethora of problems.

Again, those are problems with no solution. The solutions would only create more problems.

This post is not about recommending that you try to fix a problem or not do so, or seek help with a problem or not seek it. This is also not about apathy and giving up on everything.

It’s about increasing your awareness and understanding. Stop running in circles, chasing your tail.

The human mind sees a problem and jumps into trying to fix it. Maybe we need to take a step back and ask ourselves if the problem is worth attempting to fix. If doing nothing is just as effective at resolving a problem as doing something, then what are we wasting our time for?

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How to Make a Decision

One of my readers recently asked me for some help on “how to make a decision.” I thought this would make a good idea for a post.

The topic can quickly get complicated, so I will aim to keep this simple and practical.

When you have to make a decision, I recommend asking yourself a variety of questions. Here they are:

Does the situation demand immediate action?

I ask this question first because if the situation demands immediate action, there is no time to figure out the best possible option. You have to use any available resources and do the best that you can given the circumstance.

The main criteria for deciding if you need to take immediate action is to ask if, by doing nothing, you may cause great and irreparable harm. Usually, when this is the case, you must take action. Strangely enough, if you have the presence of mind, you may also ask yourself: By doing something, might I cause great and irreparable harm? Perhaps sometimes it is best to do nothing if you will cause more harm by doing something.

Let’s say you are in the woods alone, and you suddenly notice a bear. It is not too far up ahead from you, perhaps just 20 feet away. Many things may immediately come to mind – you could run, hide, or even stay frozen in place and wait to see what happens, but of course, your instinct is probably to do something. If the bear has not shown any sign of aggression, you may even consider slowly walking away.

Regardless of what you choose to do, you may not have much time to evaluate all your options. You may need to act on instinct. This is clearly an important choice, whatever you choose to do, but you cannot easily perform research at the moment. Your mind and body are all you have to help you. You can only hope that the bear is not hungry and not aggressive.

Another type of example will be if you or someone near you suffers a medical emergency. If someone is choking, you may need to attempt the Heimlich maneuver even if you do not feel confident in your abilities. (Even if you call 911, the operator will probably try to talk you through how to perform the Heimlich while you wait for medical assistance.) To wait for assistance and do nothing else may lead to death.

Am I the right person to make this decision?

It’s easy to assume that you need to make this decision, but perhaps you're mistaken. You should question whether you are the person with the right expertise to make such a decision before proceeding.

For example, today, I took my car to my mechanic because I heard a noise when using my brakes. He ended up recommending that I get my brakes replaced because they are worn down. Keep in mind that I don’t have much expertise in cars other than what I’ve learned by getting them serviced through the years.

The decision I have to make is whether to spend the money on this particular service. However, as far as the need for this service goes, I am willing to defer judgment to the mechanic since he is the one with the expertise to know what needs to be fixed.

If I ever have reason to believe that my mechanic is dishonest or that he lacks expertise or good judgment, then I may decide to find another mechanic.

Nonetheless, this is an area of my life where I rely on experts to help make the final decision. In such cases, I still recommend asking many questions. I always wish to understand what they want to fix, how long the parts will last, and so forth. And if they mention parts of the car I am not familiar with, I will ask how it works. I mention this for you to understand that while I defer judgment to the experts, I still aim to make sure I follow what they are doing as much as is possible. Experts can make mistakes, so if something doesn’t make sense, you should be alert and let them know.

In the end, I decided to follow the judgment of my mechanic and get the brakes replaced. My decision was to go along with his decision.

You may find yourself in a situation where you are entrusted to make a final decision. If so, do not let the power go to your head. Ask yourself if you are truly the right person to make that final decision. If not, look for someone with the right expertise to help you make the best choice. The right person may be above your level or even below it, or in another field altogether.

Is this important?

Deciding whether something is important can be trickier than it seems. Sometimes a seemingly trivial action can suddenly seem incredibly important. Or something that seems immensely important may actually be trivial if viewed differently. Nonetheless, this is a key question that you must ask yourself.

One time I was shopping for dental floss, and there happened to be about five different choices. I struggled to figure out which one was the right option. Then I realized that this was probably not such an important decision at the end of the day. I should make a decision and move on with my day. For most of my purchases that involve health in some way, I usually want something that is good quality, so I settled on one of the floss options that cost above average.

Regardless of which option I settled on, it probably wasn’t going to impact my life much.

The less important something is, the less time you should spend on it. This is because you probably have more important decisions to make in your life. And of course, the more important something is, the more time you should be willing to spend on it, to make sure you choose the best option.

Do I have all the information I need?

Something else to ask is if you have all of the information that you need to make the right choice. Are you confident that you know enough to make the right choice? Have you gathered information from different reliable sources? Do you have expertise in the area?

Be aware that you will probably never have all of the possible information. There will usually be something that you do not know about a topic. But of course, there is limited time, and you have to learn to realize when you have learned enough. When you know enough, you should stop gathering information.

If you do not have the information that you need, ask if you can get it in a reasonable amount of time. Do you know the right people or sources where you can get the right information?

If you do not have the information and cannot get it efficiently, you should find someone who can help you make this decision. Clearly, you should seek out an expert or someone with more experience.

What are my deal-breakers?

Sometimes I see people considering clearly bad options, and I can’t help but feel that they are just wasting time. Of course, we all have different ideas for what is bad.

As a brief example, if you are selecting your apples at the grocery store, you probably know to avoid any that are broken and exposed or that have dark brown spots, perhaps indicating that they have been dropped or that they are starting to rot. You do not need to take time to consider these. The options that are clearly bad should not take your time – you can safely ignore them.

To use a more impactful example, if you are house shopping, you may decide that you do not want to live in an area with a high crime rate. Or you do not want to live right next to a busy street, perhaps. We all have to decide for ourselves what the deal-breakers are – the options that are so bad we will not even consider them.

Although this seems obvious, it is easy to waste time evaluating the deal-breakers. Instead, identify them and ignore them or purposely remove them from the options that you will consider.

What are the consequences of making a mistake?

When making your decisions, consider what will happen if you make a wrong choice. Can it cause irreparable harm? Can it cause you to get stuck in a situation that you do not want to be in for many, many years? Can it cost you your job or endanger your life? Might it cost you your life savings? A valued friendship?

Or perhaps the consequences would not be so dire. Perhaps, in some cases, the worst consequence you face is losing $10. Or you may risk losing 10 minutes, having to perform an action again if you make a mistake. In such cases, you may decide that the money or the time does not concern you too much, and if you make a mistake, that is fine.

Many years ago, my parents told me they were looking into a micro-surgery option to help my Dad fix some back problems he was having. To help them, I decided to do a bit of research into a company that had sent them promotional materials regarding this service. In reading reviews and researching the company, I quickly realized that many people were claiming the micro-surgery (from this particular company) had failed to fix people’s back problems – and in many cases, people even complained that their problems had gotten worse. Unfortunately, this was a broad pattern – it did not seem to be just a few isolated cases. In the end, I recommended that my parents avoid this option.

Generally, when it comes to health, if you risk terrible consequences through making mistakes, it is worth it to take the time and to do the research to make sure you arrive at the best decision that you can make.

What are My Selection Criteria?

Hopefully, by using the above questions, you will make good decisions much more easily. But what can we do for critical and complex decision-making?

If your decision requires many different criteria that you find important, weigh those criteria. I will use buying a house as an example again. This is perhaps one of the most significant decisions that many of us will make.

Below is an example of how I would weigh the criteria if I were personally going to buy a home. Of course, if you are buying a home or making another important life choice, you should weigh your criteria in the order of importance for yourself.

1) Cost – If you are going to buy a home, you need to know the price range you will consider. Anything outside of this range will be dropped from consideration. For most things in life, the cost isn’t my first consideration, but trying to buy a house that is too expensive could lead to bankruptcy or other major financial troubles that will impact your whole life.

As a part of considering the cost of a house, I would consider the list price, cost of any transactions and fees, the average expected fees to maintain the house, and any repairs that may be needed.

2) Do I really like it? – If I am going to spend a lot of money on a home and be living there for years, I would not want to buy it unless I truly like the home. This may include the layout of the rooms, their size, the home's condition, the feeling I get from it, the style, the condition of the yard, etc.

3) Safety – I would want the home to be in a safe area with a relatively low crime rate. This might include considering whether the home is near the main street or in a residential neighborhood with less traffic.

4) Proximity to my wife’s job – I work from home, but my wife still needs to get to work, so it would help to live close to my wife’s workplace. Within a 20 minute drive would be preferable.

5) Proximity to a good grocery store, shopping center, bookstore, restaurants, a hospital, etc. - I would rather not have to drive too far to pick up the groceries or get to important places that I frequently need to go to.

6) Other considerations - These are not the most important considerations, but I would still keep them in mind. Here, I might consider distance to family members or friends, frequency of natural disasters, and other factors.

When you have decided upon your selection criteria, make sure to keep them in order of highest priority in your mind. Perhaps your budget is the most important thing, and you are unwilling to spend more than a certain amount. To stay within your budget, you may need to sacrifice something - perhaps you will have to drive a bit further to get to work, for example.

On major decisions, I think it helps to imagine them in your mind. Can you live with driving 45 minutes to work every day? Or is it important to you that it be within a 20-minute drive? When you think it through more deeply, you may realize that you wouldn’t mind the drive, or rather, you may realize that you would be miserable driving so much. Using your imagination will help you to make sure that your priorities are in the right order.

Concluding Thoughts

These are some of the key considerations I go through when I have to make a decision. I hope that this helps you. When you have a big or important decision to make, it’s best to give yourself as much time as you can. I would not want to feel pressured into making a big life decision in just a few days. I would want more time to think it through.

As a consideration that goes beyond the scope of this post, you may question whether you can create new options. This involves creative ability and knowing how to unlock infinite possibilities. I have often found myself in situations where there appeared to be just a few limited options, and I ended up creating new pathways and possibilities for myself rather than accepting the obvious options.

We all know some people who struggle to make decisions on their own. They may rely too heavily on input from friends, family, or colleagues. It can be helpful to get advice from others, but keep in mind that in the end, you will be the one who has to deal with the outcomes, whether good or bad. Be cautious with taking actions just because it would please the people around you.

Of course, there are many types of people. Some people may be content with making big decisions on a hunch or using their intuition. I prefer to explore my options and what the consequences may be analytically. I prefer to take my time for major decisions, but for decisions that do not matter much, I try to limit the time I spend on them. It’s easy to get sucked into wasting time on the things that do not matter, so you should set a time limit on such simple choices. If I feel that the available options are not the best, I’m also more than happy to create new options.

How Do You Deal with A Difficult Situation?

When someone is faced with a difficult situation, this presents us with a critical moment.

If today someone begins to harass you, to get in your face, appearing immensely agitated and perhaps looking for a fight, how will you react?

Some of us will be inclined to get back in their face and yell or argue. Others will try to calm that person down and avoid making it worse. Others may avoid the situation, perhaps backing up and apologizing, and look to remove themselves from the environment. Some people, of course, may react with fear and feel frozen, especially if the person that begins to harass you is much bigger.

If you have never experienced such a thing where an angry person confronted you and they yelled and desired to intimidate you, then that is fantastic. But unfortunately, this is something that can and does happen among colleagues, spouses, friends, and even strangers.

I have learned that when we face any difficult situation, we must deal with the immediate situation. If your mind is somewhere else, or if you panic, you can easily make things worse rather than help to improve the situation.

Something we should consider in these difficult situations is this:

Will my response make things worse?

Most of us are not used to thinking of that because if you get into an ordinary argument with a friend or spouse, you already know based on prior squabbles what the results will probably be. Perhaps you will get angry, yell, then calm down and talk it over to try to find a solution. Since most life situations have some predictability, you may assume that they will unfold similarly to your past situations have unfolded when you are in a new situation.

However, the reality may be that you do not actually know your colleagues that well, or that you do not truly know some people as well as you think you do, or that you cannot possibly predict how a stranger will react to something you do.

When we realize we are in a new and difficult situation, we should have the proper mindset to figure out the situation efficiently. The right mindset may proceed like this:

1. Pause – take a breath or stop what you are doing for a moment to avoid having to react immediately to what is happening. For example, you do not need to feel angry, scared, or defensive – you can see with clear eyes what is happening because you do not need to immediately react (unless you are actually attacked, then you would need to react).

2. Ask yourself if you are about to do something that will only make things worse. Are you just being provoked into getting angry because this individual would like to fight you? Does it truly matter who is right or wrong right now when you are both just getting more agitated? This point is crucially important.

   I have observed that when people find themselves in a difficult situation, they often take actions that make the problem worse somehow or that present them with many new problems to deal with. Basically, when you find yourself in difficult situations, you can easily become your own biggest enemy. Do your best to avoid having this happen.

3. Can you do something to deescalate this situation? Is it an option to apologize or listen and try to understand rather than to react or contradict every statement the other person makes? If the other person is highly irritated and on the verge of wanting to fight, this may not be the best time to discuss things rationally. Perhaps that can wait for another time.

4. If attempts to deescalate are not working, can you try to get someone else (e.g., a colleague or friend) to help you gain control of the situation?

5. If you cannot deescalate nor get someone to help you, can you leave the situation?

6. If you cannot immediately leave the situation, can you defend yourself or present a distraction that will help you escape?

7. If you cannot defend yourself or prepare for an escape, can you brainstorm any further options? Prepare to think outside the box. (This is an important step because every situation will be different, and you may need to find unique solutions for your particular situation.)

Although we have explored this scenario where someone approaches you that is irritated, angry, and in your face, I would also like us to consider that there are actually infinite possible difficult scenarios that we can find ourselves in. Fortunately, the general mindset illustrated above can work for anything. I will rephrase it in a more general way that could be applied to virtually any scenario:

1. Pause - take a breath or stop what you are doing for a moment to avoid having to react immediately to what is happening

2. Ask yourself if you are about to do something that will only make things worse.

3. Can you do something to improve the situation?

4. If attempts to improve the situation are not working, can you get help?

5. If you cannot get help, is there a way to leave the situation?

6. If you cannot leave the situation immediately, can you manage or control it while you wait for help, or can you look for a way to leave the situation?

7. If not, can you brainstorm any further options? Prepare to think outside the box.

The next time you face a difficult situation, try to adopt the above mindset or series of thought processes out. Most of us do not have a general plan in place for dealing with difficult situations. But the reality is that we will all face key situations in our lives sooner or later.

Are you mentally ready for it?

What Actually Guides Human Behavior? (It’s Not Reason)

Quite often, I hear people make predictions that people will behave in a certain way. Just today, I heard this on the radio:

“There is no reason kids shouldn’t be allowed to trick-or-treat even with Covid-19 being a concern. The parents need to make sure they wash their hands. And the people who give the candy need to make sure they keep their distance. If they do these things, we won’t have any problems.”

I use this example not to take a side but to shine a light on widespread problems in our thinking.

Essentially, to expect reasonable and rational behavior is itself irrational.

From what I have seen, this is the order of what actually guides human behavior:

1. Survival

2. Self-interest

3. Close relationships

4. Emotion, feelings, and intuition

5. Beliefs (e.g., religion, ethics, ideologies, politics)

6. Reason

I have met many people who are indeed quite reasonable. They work through problems in their lives methodically. But most people, most of the time, are not guided primarily by their reason. Let’s discuss these principles a bit more deeply.

Survival

The idea of survival guiding human behavior should not be difficult to understand. When your needs are not met, you will do anything to survive.

Self-interest

This should not be a shock either – we are the star of our own lives. So naturally, our focus is often on making decisions that make us happy and successful.

Close Relationships

The people closest to us in our lives are quite important to us. So often, we will make decisions that help them, or at least consider them.

Emotion, Feelings, and Intuition

Emotions, feelings, and intuition help provide us with a shortcut to make decisions effectively and efficiently much of the time. If my boss at work asks me to spit on someone he does not like, I do not need to evaluate if this falls in line with my beliefs or if this is a rational thing to do. My gut or my feelings immediately make me disgusted at the thought.

Of course, sometimes, our emotions can overwhelm us and cause us to make poor decisions. Nonetheless, they still tend to guide our actions.

Beliefs

After all the prior principles guiding our human behavior, we have our belief systems. This does not always mean religion. I can believe in certain ethical practices, or I may believe that everyone has certain rights. If none of the prior principles mentioned have led us to behave a certain way, then our belief systems will help us decide what to do.

Some people are highly religious or believe strongly in certain values or ideas, and they may aim to make this principle the primary guiding force of their lives.

Reason

Reason is last for a reason. It takes a lot of work to reason properly. If you work hard at it and fail, you may come to an unreasonable conclusion and make a bad decision. Even if you reason correctly, you may get unlucky somehow, and the outcomes of your decision may still lead to negative consequences. Otherwise, if part of your plan involves convincing other people that your reasoning is correct, you may fail to convince them even if your reasoning is correct.

So reason carries its risks. Get it wrong, and you have wasted your time. Get it right, and it still may backfire on you. Most people, most of the time, do not find good reasons to employ reason. They may not feel competent enough to think rationally or reasonably, it may be too much work, or they may have had bad experiences trying to use reason. They may have given up on it. Also, real-life has so many variables that it can be too complicated to reason through perfectly. Rather than bother to try, many of us prefer to use feelings or emotions to guide us.

We like to think that we are rational and reasonable, but the evidence does not seem to support this.

The former conclusion stands. Most people, most of the time, are not basing their decisions on reason. We cannot expect most people to behave reasonably. If we do, then we are the ones who are thinking unreasonably.

Any time I hear phrases such as “If people do this….” I already know that we are not going to be happy with the results. It isn’t easy to control or predict what a large group of people will do. Most “experts” whose job it is to predict the stock market actually fail at it. This is their job – this is how they earn their living, and they cannot predict where the stock market will go. Part of this is because they cannot predict the human behavior that affects the market.

You may be able to predict or even control what a small group of people will do. But beyond this, it seems to be a fool’s game.

Instead of guiding everyone into perfect actions or expecting them to behave perfectly rationally, we should take advantage of this knowledge that there will be unreasonable behaviors and imperfect actions everywhere we go.

How can we do this? Here are a few examples.

I am very good at avoiding car accidents because I assume that people will drive in erratic ways. I assume that they may get distracted and struggle to stay in their own lane. I have lived in places where Stop signs and traffic lights were just viewed as suggestions, so I got used to checking for traffic and pedestrians at every intersection. Ironically, assuming that perfection will happen tends to give us poor results and may result in more accidents.

As another example, when I want to succeed at something, I have backup plans. Many people end up working outside of the field that they trained for. In my case, I was studying to be a psychologist, but I changed paths and ended up becoming an author who writes about self-development, psychology, and other related themes. Fortunately, my psychology background was a great asset for this. If you are pursuing a degree, ask yourself if it will be useful for only one thing, or can you use it to succeed in various fields?

Another way to stop assuming that things will work out perfectly is to reconsider your timelines for important projects. I had a boss who once said:

“Give me your timeline. That way, I can double it in my mind. When you make up your timelines, you tend to expect things to work out perfectly, but they rarely do. We need to account for all of the problems you’ll have that we can’t predict right now.”

You can try this too. If you expect things to take a certain amount of time (usually assuming that things will work out perfectly), then double that in your mind, and that may be the true timeline.

When I see that people have assumed perfection, I expect that things will go wrong. For situations that require everyone to behave perfectly and orderly, I will avoid them and be extra cautious, waiting for something to go wrong, as it often does.

Of course, the exception here is that some people are highly trained or skilled to deal with certain scenarios. In some professions, people may operate at seemingly perfect levels to get the job done.

However, we cannot expect such a high level of rational behavior from most people, most of the time.

Learn this lesson that people do not usually make decisions based on reason, see the lack of reason around you, and use this understanding to make better decisions.

Who the Room Wants You to Be

I am on the introverted side, and I value the fact that I am my own person and not in need of being who someone else wants me to be. Nonetheless, it seems that we all feel societal pressure to be who or what the room wants us to be.

By “the room,” I mean whatever environment of people we happen to be around.

I once had a dream that left a great impact on me. In the dream, I was at a restaurant having a conversation with many physicists. My knowledge of physics is quite basic (in the dream and reality), but in the dream, I felt compelled to take on this role I was given. I didn’t understand that it was just a role, as I thought that I was a physicist and that it looked bad that I was somehow struggling to keep up with what my colleagues were telling me. Rather than admit that I was lost, I pressed forward and pretended as if I followed their words, and then I contributed my own thoughts in a vague way to try to carry on the illusion that I knew advanced concepts in physics.

The other physicists looked at me like I was crazy. Still, somehow I felt better in trying to carry on the illusion that I was a physicist, rather than admit that I was in a false role, which may have been admitting that my whole life was false (within the context of the dream).

This scenario with physicists faded into a blur, and I found myself somewhere else.

I was in prison. I quickly took on the attitude and role of prisoner then. I started to talk like them, feel like them, act like them. I knew in my heart that I was not the prisoner type, but something about waking up in this role demanded that I fill it. It was clear that acting as if I did not belong in prison would have done nothing to help me get out of there. I took on the role as if I were truly a prisoner. This meant that if a weaker-looking prisoner caused trouble with me, I felt the need to put him in his place. On the other hand, I respected the bigger or more senior prisoners. Basically, I became just another prisoner in the short course of this dream.

Then this scenario faded away, and I found myself in another one.

I was having a romantic dinner with someone. From being in this scenario for just a moment, I figured out that this was my fiancé (only in the dream world), but I didn’t actually recognize the person. I assumed something was wrong with me for not remembering my own fiancé, and I felt the need to fill this role properly. I needed to be the good loving fiancé, and I needed to successfully have this romantic dinner with this person, even if I could not recall why or how I had gotten there. This seemed to be a fancy, special dinner. I couldn’t face the idea of ruining this night for this other person who I didn’t even know but who appeared to know me so well.

These were all deeply uncomfortable dreams for me, but I found comfort in pretending to be the role that I appeared to be, rather than acknowledging that my role was false and my life was false.

Why did this series of dreams leave such an impact on me?

It made me realize how powerful the room is that guides us into being who we are. My mind is always monitoring what it feels I am expected to be, and sometimes this can impede me from actually being who I am.

In any given situation, I may think: I’m supposed to laugh here, I’m supposed to compliment here, I’m supposed to thank this person here, I’m supposed to feel uncomfortable here, I’m supposed to get scared now, I’m supposed to be disgusted, I’m supposed to want to be friends with this person, I’m supposed to apologize, I’m supposed to feel grateful, or I’m supposed to want to be here, and so on.

I’m not a robot, so I have feelings, emotions, and more human ways of thinking. But I also always seem to have this overactive thinking mode that focuses on what I am supposed to be, do, or feel, rather than what I actually am or what I actually feel. The thinking mode seems to interfere with the being mode.

My mind is always reading the room, judging what the room wants from me. And I get the sense that if I am not giving it what it wants, I am not properly filling my role. Or I may feel that I am somehow failing to be what I was supposed to be. If I am not what others expect of me, then who am I? Is it good enough to be what I expect me to be?

And then we have to ask, is my role in my life one that I am just playing out? Could I just as easily have been in any other life situation or scenario? With one wrong turn in my life, could I have been put in prison? And if I were put in prison, wouldn’t I just become another prisoner? Another face in the crowd, doing what he is expected to do based on the circumstance.

For anyone I see in the streets, or at work, or even at home, are these just people filling a role at a certain point in time, or is this actually who they are? Is the Mom just filling the Mom role, or is she being the Mom? What about the police officer? What about the teacher? The clerk at the grocery store?

Are the roles actually minor aspects of who we truly are, but they somehow end up taking over our lives? When we see the role someone is playing, it isn’t easy to see them as anything else. In some ways, the humanity may be stripped away, and we see the role, not the person.

As humans, we can know what people in the room want from us and then attempt to appease them. And it’s difficult to resist the urge to appease those around us because it feels rewarding when they like us, or want to be around us, or congratulate us for being what they wanted us to be.

We can say that “I am not being controlled by any room – I am my own person,” but that is not quite my point. Of course, anyone can choose to go against what the room wants. My point is that we all have this benchmark understanding of what the room wants from us. And so it feels like anything we do is a reaction to that. Imagine that someone suddenly throws a ball at your face. Whether you try to get out of the way or catch it, or even if you get hit by it, you cannot deny that the ball is coming toward you and that you must do something. What the room wants from us is just as powerful as the ball coming at your face – it demands that you respond somehow.

Sometimes I come across people who, when they interact with me, are reacting to what they expect me to want them to do or reacting to what they expect me to be thinking. Much of the time, they are wrong. I clear my throat sometimes, and people sometimes think I am trying to rush them. Actually, I’m just clearing my throat – it’s something I do more than most people, and I’m not sure why, but I don’t do it to try to rush anyone. Once they have identified me clearing my throat as something people do to rush other people, it’s difficult for them to get away from that thought. They feel forced into reacting to that thought. Sometimes they apologize for inconveniencing me, even though that was not even on my mind.

Other times, I have asked for help with something, and the person has gotten very angry with me. Apparently, they were overwhelmed with their own life, and they got angry that I would dare to “impose” extra work on them and “expect” them to do it for free. However, I wasn’t expecting anything – I had simply been asking a question to see if they were in the position to help. They were reacting to what they thought I would be thinking or expecting.

So interestingly, many of us are reacting to this room, and the room is a mirage. What we think the room wants often isn’t even what it wants. But we react to it somehow. We can go along with what it wants or against it, but we are reacting to it either way. Once we have a benchmark in mind for what the room wants, it’s difficult to escape this “reality bubble” we have created. It’s a reality bubble because it is a true perception of reality in some respects and false in others. When you realize its falseness, it pops, and another reality bubble replaces it. This can happen over and over. We tend to think that our current reality bubble represents the true reality, but of course, it never actually does.

The Lesser Paths and Better Paths

I see regret in many people. It is painful to wake up to our lives and realize that we are on the wrong path. It may appear we have chosen the wrong job, we have sought the wrong relationship, raised our kids improperly, moved to the wrong town, and so on.

When our path is wrong, we feel it with our whole body, with the resistance of every fiber of our being wanting something else. Anything else. We want to eliminate the dead weight we carry around every day as part of our life’s burden.

However, we often forget that we needed this wrong path to see how wrong it truly was. Or we needed this wrong path to learn great lessons that would help us on the road to better paths. Or, in many cases, when we are young, no one could have talked us out of taking this path. It’s as if it were our destiny. I’m aware of many people who had a hunger for adventure and travel, and so they went to different states or even countries, only to realize that the place they truly belonged was back at home where they grew up.

I use the term “wrong path” because we all know what it means. But we must understand that a path that seems right for us in one moment can change and become the wrong path. And vice versa.

Truthfully, the wrong path does not exist. There are only better paths and lesser paths. Naturally, we will aim to take better paths and avoid the lesser ones. And when we cannot avoid them, we will wish to get through the lesser paths as quickly as we can to move on to something better.

Here is what comes to mind for me when I think of the lesser and better paths.

When I finished my undergraduate studies at Purdue University, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my life. I thought it made sense to continue my studies in psychology, as I did enjoy the field. So I decided to go to graduate school, but many things on that journey ended up being wrong for me, and I chose to leave after three years with a master’s degree even though I had been expected to finish the Ph.D. degree there.

During my time there, I struggled to enjoy anything that I was doing. Everything seemed like work to fill my life with. I lost perspective, and in many ways, I stopped recognizing who I was. I had become whatever I needed to be to fulfill the role of graduate student that I had been playing. I was playing the role, not fully embodying it as my own self. For me, it was the right choice to leave.

A few years after leaving, I realized that this “wrong path” in life had given me so much. I completed advanced courses in psychology and statistics. I had published academic articles and book chapters, which helped me learn to write professionally. I learned to organize my time and work, which was something I had never done before this. I practiced presentational skills, which was an area that I always struggled to perform well in. And I learned to work collaboratively rather than just on my own. Almost everything I had done helped me to later succeed in creating my own life and business on my own terms. In the end, I had done so much in three years that I felt as if I had acquired six years’ worth of experience in that period. One of the things I disliked the most in the program was the intense workload, but I could finally see that it had all been worth it after finishing.

Understand that when we are on the wrong path, often, this is just a part of our journey toward something better. I am glad that I completed three years in the graduate program because that allowed me to gain most of the benefits from being there. If I had left earlier, I may have lived with regret, knowing that I could have learned and accomplished so much more. Yet if I had left later, I would have also lived with regret, knowing that I was living a lie, pursuing something that was not me. I had been working toward something that my heart was no longer in.

When you believe you are on the wrong path, you have to ask yourself if there is a better path available to you. If not, it could make sense to continue on the road you are on, as long as you gain something from it. However, sometimes, to find a better pathway, you must open yourself up to the unknown, to uncertainty, and explore what you can create in your life out of nothing. Sometimes it is worth taking that leap.

A realization I have come to in living my own wrong paths and seeing others live theirs is that we need these paths in our lives. In many ways, our lives may end up just being a series of lesser paths that we take, and then better paths, and then lesser, and then better, in endless cycles.

The lesser paths that we take help us learn and grow to identify those better paths. With that experience, we can then take those better paths more courageously, confidently, with greater skill, poise, and gratitude.

Ultimately, the lessons that we learn along the journey of lesser and better paths will help us become our better selves.