by Sam Kyle
What you want is a tool that cuts through all the “what ifs” and “what abouts,” a technique that skips over guilt and the “should dos.” An article on Farnam Street describes a simple thought experiment based on Bayes’ Theorem. If you aren’t sure how much you actually believe something, imagine going into a casino and placing a bet. The idea of quantifying how much we would risk on something being true will tell us a lot about if we actually believe it. For example, say you get a job offer and you are unsure whether to take it. It seems amazing, but you’re doubting yourself. To access your “hell yeah!” or “hell no!” visualize yourself beside a table with a stack of chips. You see a square called “in 1 year my life will rock if I take this job.” How much do you put on it? Ten grand? Twenty bucks? How much you’re willing to risk will tell you immediately what you think about that job. There’s your answer.
Environment Matters
It’s important to recognize that we’re worse at intuitive decision-making when we’re under intense stress or duress, or if we’re sleep deprived or otherwise not at our best. For example, throughout 2018 a sleep-deprived and over-stressed Elon Musk made some dubious decisions, like getting angry at analysts, sending unwise tweets, and alienating employees. No one can make good decisions without ever taking time off. The tired cellist Yo-Yo Ma once left his $2.5-million violin in the back of a taxi (and luckily got it back).
The better your mindset, the better equipped you are to identify a “hell yeah!” People tend to be better at intuitive decision-making in a happy mood and to subsequently place higher value on outcomes if there’s a match between mood and approach. So you want to be calm and well-rested.
As the authors of Thinking, feeling and deciding write, “A guiding metaphor for much cognitive psychology has been the brain as a computer.” This presents emotions as little more than a disruption of rationality: “Thinking has been understood as quite apart from feeling…. Emotions act as a heuristic. That is, emotions provide an accessible summary of experience, cognitions, and memories.” Emotions, in general, are closely intertwined with intuition: “A study of investment club members...found that individuals who experienced more intense emotions achieved higher decision-making performance.... There is also evidence that we rely on emotional cues in rapid, automatic decision-making, and they confer a tangible advantage to everyday decision-making.” You don’t need to act like a robot with no emotions.
Ideally, the bigger the decision, the more important it is to get to “hell yeah!” or “hell no!”, the more we need to give ourselves some calm space to activate our intuition. Being tired and hungry will make us more biased in one direction, while just having won a game will lead us in another.
“Hell yeah!” is important. It means you’re going to go all in.
We don’t want how we felt in the last 10 minutes to be the deciding factor.
Using Intuition
It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. —Seneca, On The Shortness of Life
Given a lever long enough, Archimedes claimed over 2000 years ago, he could lift the world. Leverage is a powerful concept. By applying the right amount of force in the right area, we can achieve outsized results. But spreading ourselves too thin gets us nowhere.
We all have a limited amount of time, energy, and resources at our disposal. Like the ancient Egyptians lifting stone blocks weighing up to 100 tons with simple levers, we can often get far better results with a focused effort than with a scattershot, exhausting one. It can be far more effective to make few, high-quality decisions than to attempt to do everything. Getting more done isn't productive if what we're doing doesn't move the needle.
“Hell yeah!” people, opportunities, projects, choices and so on are high-leverage. We feel truly enthusiastic about them, so we bring genuine energy and attention and get results to match. We chose them because we wanted to, not because we couldn't see an alternative or couldn't think of a reason not to. When you start filtering decisions based on your initial intuitive reaction, you stop squandering so much energy on things you feel ambivalent towards. They’re not worth your time.
The financial independence movement is predicated on taking a “hell yeah!” approach to spending. Proponents aim to retire at a relatively young age, well before their sixties. Most don't achieve this through high incomes or inheritances - they do it by only putting money towards uses deemed truly worthwhile and that meet a genuine need. They don't spend for the sake of it and prioritize control of their time over luxury.
We've normalized spending as much money as we have available, even if it doesn't bring happiness and is just the result of habit or social pressure. But if you view each unit of money as a chunk of your life you sacrifice, the perspective shifts. The question is no longer, “What can I afford?” It's, “What's the minimum I can spend while still deriving maximum happiness?” You can buy stuff now or freedom later, but not both. Spending more than necessary means sacrificing your freedom.
Think of car ownership. Owning the largest, most expensive car possible has become, in some cultures, a mark of status. People have developed an expectation that self-worth and vehicle size are one and the same. People are happy to go into high-interest debt to get the biggest car or even to get an additional car.
If this is the case for you, then your “hell yeah!” is about the car, with the associated debt a minor irritation. The trade-offs involved, like working longer in a job you don’t really like just because the paycheck supports that vehicle, are no big deal. But there are others who have no problem driving a low-end car because their “hell yeah!” is about having the freedom to not do any work that isn’t also a “hell yeah!” It’s important to weigh it up before you get caught up in doing what your neighbors or coworkers do.
The “hell yeah!” approach is also in sharp contrast to typical dating advice, which usually advises on reading nebulous signs or persuading others of your worthiness. If you really like someone, you don’t need to wait three days to text them or put on an act. You just do what feels natural and don’t feel the need to manipulate anyone. If someone isn’t messaging you back, you can safely conclude you aren’t a “hell yeah!” for them. For that reason alone, they aren’t a “hell yeah!” for you. This applies to friends, lovers, family, anyone you spend time with. Meaningful relationships take an investment of time, a finite resource for all of us. Recognizing that someone isn’t a “hell yeah!” for you lets you move on to people who genuinely improve your life by being in it.
No matter what form your relationship takes, you always want to focus on the people who actually want to spend time with you. You want to be a “hell yeah!” for others as well. So all the time you stop wasting in dead end relationships can be spent developing your self-awareness of what you have to offer others.
Tame Problems vs. Wicked Problems
You're facing a big decision, one that could dictate the rest of your life. Maybe you're deciding what field of study to pursue, whether you should move to a different country or stay where you are, and so on. Maybe it's smaller but still significant—a big deal requiring an optimal solution. Or is it?
Tame problems include games like chess and the majority of mathematical propositions.... In contrast to these are wicked problems; problems where there is no way of formulating the issue at stake definitively, nor any such thing as a single or definitive solution...life itself is a wicked problem.” —Tom Chatfield, How To Thrive In The Digital Age
In the 1970s, design theorists Horst Rittel and Melvin M. Weber coined the terms “tame and wicked problems.”
A wicked problem has no perfect outcome. It's impossible to solve. We don't even know the requ
irements for solving it and the problem keeps on changing as we try. When we attempt to solve it, we create new wicked problems which may be equally resistant to resolution. Any solutions are contrary to the principle of bivalence, being neither right nor wrong, merely better or worse.
In Design of Business: Why Design Thinking Is The Next Competitive Advantage, Roger L Martin compares attempting to solve a wicked problem to “trying to grasp a handful of sand: the harder you grip, the more the sand slips between your fingers.” The more we ponder it, the more wicked the problem becomes. Keith Grint further explains the role of uncertainty in wicked problems in Leadership: A Very Short Introduction: tame problems have occurred before so they are more certain. They are predictable. Meanwhile, “a wicked problem is complex rather than just complicated—that is, it cannot be removed from its environment, solved, and returned without affecting the environment.”
World poverty is a wicked problem. There are countless perspectives on what the issue is and how to solve it, many contradictory. It’s connected to other wicked problems like gender imbalances, educational inequality, health care, and so on. We don’t have comprehensive data to assess the extent of every part of the problem. Add in numerous ideological and cultural conflicts, a gulf between those who experience it and those with the most power to solve it, and a resistance to change in some areas, and there’s no outright solution. Healthcare and climate change are other wicked problems.
This is in contrast to “tame” problems which we can define and solve, even if not easily. Solutions are either right or wrong, and it’s usually clear straight away which one is which. And if it’s not, it’s possible to try multiple solutions to find the right one through trial and error. Video games, chess, and sports matches are all tame problems. You can win them or lose them.
We often approach life decisions, such as relationships and “finding your passion,” as if they were tame problems. There must be a solution. We just need to find it. Yet many of the big decisions in our lives concern what could be categorized as wicked problems. There are no right or wrong choices, merely better or worse ones. They are subject to nonlinear dynamics, having unpredictable, even chaotic outcomes. Even if the problem is far from unusual, our individual situations are always unique. If we dislike our choice, there's no option of a do-over. In life, true solutions are rare.
Imagine you're faced with a choice between two job offers. Each has its upsides and downsides, although neither is overwhelmingly better. Perhaps one pays slightly more, while the other has a much shorter commute, or one appears to be more interesting while the other has better benefits.
It may feel as though there is a right answer to be ascertained through rational analysis, such as by making a list of pros and cons. As we've already seen, such methods tend to serve as justifications for what we want to be true which means they aren't as useful as we think.
This is a wicked problem. It changes depending on how you look at it and what you prioritize. Different stakeholders in the decision have radically different ideas of the perfect solution. Your family might prefer you to take the better-paid option. Your close friends may wish you’d choose the shorter commute, leaving more time to spend with them. You only get one shot at making up your mind and can't try again like with a board game if you dislike the choice.
We often overstate the impact life changes will have on our happiness. This is known as hedonic adaptation and was first shown in a study that found that lottery winners tended to return to their baseline level of happiness after a short time. While we may expect to become much happier by making the right decisions, our level of happiness tends to rise only temporarily. Inevitably, new problems and challenges emerge. We grow accustomed to life changes and return to our equilibrium. Homeostasis is a powerful force.
In the case of the job options, if one is a lot better you may feel happier for a while, but you're likely to adapt. If the other is terrible you'll probably adapt too—or, hopefully, leave as soon as possible. While this is not to say the experience would be in any way identical, the differences in happiness may be, averaged out, marginal. What we think will make us happier doesn’t always do so. We can’t predict outcomes on paper.
Solely rational decision-making processes don’t take into account the wide spectrum of possible outcomes for wicked problems and can lead us to expect a particular outcome or to not consider long-tail occurrences—the unexpected but absolutely possible things that could happen. The implicit uncertainty means any sort of mathematical calculations are probably doomed to fail because we can’t assign probabilities to most outcomes, and to be honest, most of us don’t have the ability to do complex probability math. If that's the case, there's something to be said for learning from our experiences, being as aware as we can of our biases, and simply making “hell yeah!” decisions. When we need to confront a wicked problem, we should use our intuition to make decisions we feel good about. If there’s no perfect solution, stop worrying and go with what feels like a “hell yeah!” Make the decision that feels right and stop getting hung up on the details.
Conclusion
Just pay close attention to what excites you and what drains you. —Derek Sivers, Anything You Want
By paying closer attention to our initial gut feelings when we’re presented with decisions, we can put our time and energy behind the highest leverage opportunities and options. Intuitive judgment can be a powerful means of making decisions that takes into account a lifetime of learning and reflects the reality of how we make up our minds. Although intuition has a reputation for being less effective than rational decision-making processes, it’s far from irrational and is something we can hone over time.
The obvious caveat is that we can't use the “hell yeah!” approach for all our decisions. It works best for areas with rapid feedback loops, and where the consequences of imperfect decisions aren't drastic. As Daniel Kahneman advises, ask yourself, “Is the domain one where there is enough regularity to support intuitions?” Domains like medicine and chess are ideal for intuition because the feedback on bad decisions is rapid and unambiguous. Domains that are more subject to randomness and therefore attribution errors are less suitable, because the patterns we unconsciously identify may not be patterns at all. The key is the quality of feedback
When you look at an opportunity and think “hell yeah!” you’re drawing on a lifetime of learning and experiencing. As we’ve just seen, what looks like a split-second decision is nothing of the sort. As dramatic as it sounds, your entire life has led up to that moment. So use it well.
Works Cited
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