Theory #12: Micro-Choice Inertia

If you are following along with the home game version of the book of Mark, you’ll remember that, after 10 theories mostly dealing with self-actualization, we are now in the early stages of different theories about practical decision-making in a complex world.

Today’s installment may seem straightforward, but I think when applied properly it is probably one of the most useful in the package. Whereas the last theory dealt with “fork in the road” type decisions, this week I am concerned with more subtle decisions, the kind of decisions we keep subconsciously putting off to the point that we don’t even realize that we are neglecting to make them.

How many times have you heard someone look back over a period of time and express surprise and regret over how quickly time has passed, how quickly we age, how little has changed, and how little he/she has accomplished?

One of the key factors behind poor decision making is the fact that the details of life can sometimes distract us from the bigger picture. (I have already spoken at length about the details of life.) Many times we don’t even realize that we are not accomplishing what we want from life because we are not focusing our attention where it should be. I believe that the choices we make are often, when taken alone, small and insignificant. However, when taken together, a series of small and seemingly insignificant choices repeated over a period of time can total the sum of one very wrong decision. Because these are smaller decisions, we lose sight of the fact that we are slowly, almost undetectably, making an error in judgment.

I offer a simple four part test that you can apply to many different problems in your life. It is an exercise is demonstrating how easily it is for us to fall off track, and how simple it can be to get back on track just by keeping your focus on the bigger picture. I encourage you to try this exercise out with questions like:

Why is my career not going as well as I hoped?
Why do my relationships keep ending the same way?
Am I saving enough for retirement? For my child’s education?
Why am I still such a lousy golfer?
Why do I sometimes make bad moral choices?
Why do I drink or smoke too much?

One thing to note about this four part test – it isn’t mine. I stole it from a candidate I was interviewing. He didn’t mean it as a life theory and was applying it as a management style for specific situations, but I liked it so much I have adopted it. The candidate didn’t get the job and now he is getting plagiarized, and because I am not sure which candidate it was (two of them were very similar) I can’t even give credit. Nonetheless, I benefited from his wisdom and now so can you.

Besides, I have already been pretty clear about the fact that I am going to be borrowing from other great thinkers.

On with the test: Next time you find yourself struggling with a specific goal, or wondering why a certain part of your life might have gone off track, just take a moment to answer the following four questions:

Question #1: What is it that you want? (What are you trying to accomplish? What is the goal?)

Seems easy enough, but sometimes we are spinning wheels and not focusing on the prize. Let’s put it this way, if you don’t know the answer to this question, you have already discovered why you are struggling, and answering Question 1 is the only thing you need to be working on.

Question 2: What are you doing to accomplish your goal?

It is amazing to think of the cartwheels we will do just to prevent having to pass judgment on ourselves. Separating self-bias and judgment from the equation, and forcing us to objectively list what action we have taken, can be an eye-opening experience that makes it much easier to face the reality of question 3.

Question 3: Do you believe that what you are doing in Question 2 is enough to accomplish your goal?

Here is where the participant will often open his/her eyes and realize two very important things:

a) I am simply not doing enough to accomplish what I want to.
b) Nothing will change unless I change it myself.

Question 4: What more do you think you should be doing?

Alas, the answer to question 4 may not be as simple as we all hope. It may involve making life changes, re-evaluating priorities, and even seeking help from others. Nonetheless, if you emerge from the first three questions with an honest assessment of things, the answer to question 4 can ultimately be the ticket to reaching your goal.

Clearly, this is a very straightforward exercise to undergo. Most people, as I explain it to them, look at me cock-eyed when I first go through it (bear in mind this conversation usually takes place at a bar), but I think that most of us are guilty of falling victim to bad habits. It is very difficult to change habits unless you are looking from a broader perspective.

The answer often falls in the little decisions we make day in and day out, not in big landmark decisions that bring sudden lasting change. We often need to change our daily routine and realize that it will take a series of small steps, rather than one big one, that will get us where we need to go. Putting aside $100 this month may only make $100 of difference. Making that decision again and again over 15 years can make a world of difference. It is the same with turning down that one cigarette when you try to quit. One cigarette doesn’t hurt you, but repeating that decision does.

Therein lies Theory 12 in the Book of Mark: Seemingly small choices involving the details of life can distract us from the big picture. Sometimes we need to step aside and honestly evaluate our activity to help us get back on track. The “micro-choices” in life, when added together, can be just as important as life’s big decisions.

Theory 11: The Longest Run. Part B: The Gamblers' Code

I have now started Part B of Theory 11 on three separate occasions. Unfortunately, I lack the focus to write about what I have scheduled, so I keep on finding myself rambling about things well outside the scope of this web site.

How ironic that just as I gear up to write a Book of Mark submission on how intelligent gambling can help people make better life decisions, the American government moves to prohibit Internet gambling by attaching new regulations to the recently passed Port Security Bill. (For more on how this will impact online poker, I’d suggest going here.)

Having poker attacked by the US government, just as I planned to praise playing poker, has just been too much of a coincidence for my mind to pass up. I keep going off on a tangent.

I am going to try again now and do the post I set out to do. See if you can pinpoint the exact moment when I wander off topic:

Here is where we left off:

Your decisions, not your genes, will define your life.
From the moment you are born, you learn of the importance of your decisions. Your brain receives positive feedback when the results you desire occur as a result of your decisions. Your brain receives negative feedback when you make a decision that leads to bad results.
There is a great deal of gamble in life. Sometimes it is very difficult to know what the results of your decisions will be, and results can often punish good decisions and reward bad ones.

Here is where I am going:

I believe that many people make bad decisions because we are often guilty of relying on our own brain’s feedback without considering the importance of sample size. We rely too much on our own perceptions and do too little to investigate the larger law of averages.
Even though you can’t guarantee what result will come from a single decision, you must accept that the better you are making decisions, the better the results of your decisions will ultimately be.
In order to make better decisions, you must strive to better understand the gamble within life. In order to do this, you must distance yourself from short term results and focus solely and the quality of your decision-making. When you do this you are rewarded in the long run.
As the quality of your decision-making improves, the immediate results of your decisions, whether they are good or bad in the short run, become less and less important. You can still rely on the longest run working out.

Naturally, I hope to draw these points out in a logical way, with all kinds of pertinent examples. Still with me so far? Ok then.

I would now like to take a moment to address every religious person in the world, be you Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, a rare surviving Branch Davidian, or anything else:

Through the course of my life I have gathered that most you benefit from your own personal beliefs and have become better people as a result. I have only respect for that. Good people use their faith as their own inspiration to do wonderful things, enriching their lives and the lives of people around them. Unfortunately, some people use religion not as a means for their own enlightenment, but as justification for limiting the freedom of others, and for other horrible acts.

In short, I make a practice never to judge people by their religion alone. Religious beliefs have inspired great things in great people. They have also inspired horrible things in lesser people.

That pretty much covers my thoughts on religion.

South of the border in the great United States, I have watched as religion has increasingly become the sole driving force behind many of its most important political decisions. Freedom, the one ideal that the US still regularly trumpets as its mandate, is what ends up suffering. Like I said above, religion is what you make it. Too many countries make it into a manipulative fear-mongering tool to justify putting limitations of people’s freedom and slowing down the entire human evolution train. The US has chosen its company in this respect, and it will certainly make for historic times.

Must. Get back. On topic.

Poker, like religion, is also what you make it. To many people, it is an outlet for one’s darkest weakness: A need to surrender to chance and to continue risking until all is lost. My loose understanding of psychology is that chronic gamblers (chronic LOSING gamblers) suffer from innate self-loathing or insecurity to the point where they must keep going until they lose everything. It is an adrenaline rush, and it is fiercely addictive. Bad things happen when people fall too deep within the clutches of gambling. This is why Senator Frist is trying to ban it. He assures me that anyone who loves families must support a government-forced halt to this behaviour.

Believe it or not, poker can also be a positive thing. I know this first hand. As someone who loves to gamble, but will not stand for throwing money away, I was forced to learn to play well. I take pride in the fact that I am a winning poker player. I am NOT a great poker player. I will probably NEVER be a great poker player. I play because I love to play, and I love what it teaches mr about myself.

Being a good player requires many skills, but there is one skill that I value above all others: I have learned to appreciate the long run. I have learned, very slowly and very painfully, that even when you put yourself in a great position, when the money is all in and you are a giant favourite, you still lose fairly often. In fact, you have to let go of the romantic notion that can EXPECT to win on ay given day. There is just too much chance to allow for this. However, if you make right decisions, again and again, over many hands, over a long period of time, you can rely on more good things happening than bad.

Some time ago I stopped worrying about whether I won or lost individual hands. I started taking amusement in bad beats. After all, I play a lot of hands. I have to expect to get unlucky every now and then. But, I trust, I ACTUALLY TRUST, that I am making enough good decisions that it will work out in the long run. And it generally does.

Life, like poker and religion, is also what you make it. We all are forced to make millions of decisions every single day. Some we stress over as if they will be sole determining factor in how life will turn out:

Which career should I pursue?
Should I buy that house?
Should I be gay or straight?
Should I have children?

Don’t get me wrong, those decisions will have a dramatic impact on your life. Some decisions change everything. Some decisions, such as moral decisions, can never be undone. (I consider knowingly making bad moral decisions the poker equivalent of playing with more than you can afford to lose.)

However, if you keep grinding out good decisions, day in and day out, it almost won’t matter what fork in the road you will take. Every single path can lead to happiness provided you navigate it well.

Unfortunately, many poker players take a different tact. They don’t learn the math, and they rely only on personal experience to guide decisions. They remember and attach too much significance to individual hands. They remember the times when they made (mathematically) the wrong decision, and got lucky. This luck ends up costing them more in the long run, as they repeat their mistakes and eventually it all works against them, rather than for them.

Sadly, in life, the metaphor holds. People use single events as a justification for continued poor decision making. They believe what they want to believe and they let their minds convince them that everything will still somehow work out in the end. They don’t evaluate their decision making objectively because they don’t want to face the path they are actually putting themselves on.

And so I give you Theory 11 in the Book of Mark – If you focus on the quality of your decision making process, as opposed to the results that occur from individual decisions, you can have faith that good results will consistently follow. Life may not always be so predictable as to give you the exact results you wanted when you want them, but, IN THE LONG RUN, you will be a consistent winner in the high stakes game of living life. In fact, as long as you trust in your ability to make decisions, you can stop sweating about individual choices. You’ll be OK taking almost any path.

In Part A I posed a hypothetical about a very unfortunate woman. You can argue that she may have wanted to be a better driver, but there is no clear mistake that she has made. The gamble in life means that some horrible things can happen that really aren’t your fault. You need to learn to deal with bad beats and trust in yourself.

Unfortunately, if you live in the US, you may not have the option of using poker as a tool for developing respect for the long run, for trusting in your decisions, or for learning to take bad beats. Your freely elected government feels that poker’s potential for leading people to bad decisions is too much of a threat to your vulnerable sensibilities. I understand that having your own religion is still legal for now, even though it carries many of the same risks as poker. You may want to pursue that perfectly legal option.

Funnily enough, as I head into a period of life that seems to have more forks in the road than I can remember, I take great comfort in what poker has taught me. I don’t really know where I’ll be in two years, but I trust myself to end up somewhere nice.