Many years ago, when our kids were in elementary school, my husband and I used to drop them off at school together before continuing on to our respective places of work. (Yeah…. young family; one car.) One morning, our second-grade son, who was always worried about being late to school, started the following exchange:
Kid “Daddy, what time is it?”
Dad “It’s 7:32.”
Kid “Mommy, what time is it?”
Mom “Sweetie, it’s 7:30.”
Kid “Daddy wins!”
I was completely shocked. Whoever thought that telling time – or simply estimating it – was a matter of competition? Of one person ‘doing better’ than the other? But to our young son, it seemed natural that the bigger number was somehow better – even though it meant that we had two fewer minutes to get him to school on time.
I’ve thought about that exchange for a long time. I first thought that it was simply a function of our son’s youth and inexperience. But as strange as it seemed to me at first, I’ve witnessed much older and more sophisticated individuals act in ways that, though perhaps less obvious, were similarly superficial and ultimately misguided. As it turns out, most people don’t seem to grow out of this habit.
Over time I’ve come to believe that, in fact, this kind of thinking is actually built in to the human brain, even if it’s ultimately counterproductive in certain contexts. Our brains are simply hard-wired to pay attention to the easy-to-recognize stuff, and to automatically assume that ‘bigger’, ‘faster’, ‘taller’, ‘smarter’ – in other words more of whatever – is always better. One can certainly imagine that this arose as an evolutionary advantage in a world where bigger, stronger, and faster typically meant survival, even if it doesn’t apply to modern questions like getting-to-school-on-time.
Yet the phenomenon goes deeper. If the human brain is a somewhat automatic comparison machine, one that’s always looking for the things that are bigger, more, newer, flashier, etc., making decisions in a complex world like ours becomes increasingly more difficult and anxiety producing. We don’t live in a simple, material world anymore. Have I seen everything? What if there’s something better out there? The stock market’s up, right? If I invest now, will the market go down again? If I wait, will something better turn up? Is it enough? Is it good enough? Am I good enough?
We don’t seem to have an innate ability to reflect on the reasonableness of this infinite series of questions, and of whether and when it’s time to stop. Because of that, we dig ourselves into holes that we find it difficult to get out of. For every decision we want to make, our instinct is that there is a single, right answer, and that we can find it.
But these are false assumptions. The world is complex. The future is uncertain. Inputs to most of the decisions we’re called on to make are multi-variate, mutable, and may even be unknown. And if there is not, in fact, one ‘right’ answer, how can we decide anything? Yet clearly, a stress-filled, anxiety-driven stasis is worse than most other options that we might choose for ourselves.
Perhaps we need a different perspective. Let’s first assume that our brains are tricking us into demanding absolute answers, when that’s no longer possible or adaptive in our current evolutionary circumstances. Then, we can proceed by embracing our ability to understand that decisions are inherently complex, and that more of one thing is frequently accompanied by less of something else that also happens to be important to us. For example, what if the job that pays more is the same job that is less fulfilling? In that case we need to ask the question: “What do I actually want more of? Money or job satisfaction?” And it’s often not an easy question to answer. Sometimes it’s not even a question that can be answered definitively, or for all time.
Yet even if there are no absolute answers, there are typically answers or outcomes that you can pretty easily identify as better than others. That means there’s a group or set of answers or outcomes that is – or is highly likely to be – better than another set of suboptimal ones, and better still than a set of clearly awful ones.
Given that, you don’t need to obsess about finding the best decision or path of action at all. In fact, such a thing is probably a figment of your imagination anyway. What you need to do is find a decision that is pretty clearly better (or likely to be) than most of the others and do that. Don’t worry about being perfect. You can’t be. The outcome you’ll achieve will almost certainly be better than doing nothing. Moreover, it will give you the chance to learn things you didn’t know before and therefore make other, still better decisions. And so on. You’ll end up making progress. And while perfect is elusive, progress is real.
Should you invest now? What if the market goes down again? What if there’s a recession? What if the Fed lowers (or raises) interest rates? What if the dollar wobbles? What if….
Here’s what we do know. We know that 20 years from now it won’t matter when during the year you’ve started to invest. Even if you systematically begin to invest on the worst possible day of any particular year, what truly matters is that you start, and stay invested. If you get hung up on a near-term goal of perfect, you miss the bigger picture of good, and of progress.
Many, many things in life are like that. Honestly, after all these years I can’t remember whether we arrived at our son’s school at 7:48 or 7:50. But I do know that we got him there. And that he went on to high school and college and then to other, also good, things.
So, let’s focus on progress rather than perfect. Let’s us know if we can help.