Have a Big Decision to Make? Might as Well Flip a Coin.
Have you ever been faced with an important decision, one so big, so hard, so overwhelming that you felt positively paralyzed by it? What did you do? How did you make the decision? Was it the right decision, or the wrong decision? And, how do you really know, anyway?
Life doesn’t come with a control group. There is no side-by-side experiment where you can simulate the outcomes, either in the near present or projected out over decades, stemming from one set of choices versus another. You can’t predict the future, you just have to make the best decision you have with the fullest data set available to you. As the great poet laureate Maya Angelou once said, “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”
But, what do you do until you know better? How do you make that first, important, momentum catalyzing step to crawl out from the bowels of indecision?
It turns out that deciding to flip a coin works just as well.
Steven D. Levitt, co-author of Freakonomics, studied people who were struggling to make big life choices — leaving a job, ending a relationships, starting a diet, seeking more education, quitting smoking — and learned that people who flip a coin, regardless of the outcome, are more satisfied with their decisions, and much happier six months later than those whose coin toss instructed them to maintain the status quo. In other words, action beats stagnation.
Now, personally, I am the living embodiment of Newton’s First Law of Physics: a body in motion stays in motion. So when I’m in a groove, I’m golden. But when travel, when I have a big deadline, when there is, say, a global pandemic, I lose my way. Bad eating, sickness, injury waylay me. When I’m off the path, I’m practically full frontal in the gutter.
The best antidote to inaction is action, so I try to remind myself that anything beats nothing, and then I call a friend and ask them to join me the next day in The First Thing I Need to Do. Accountability always gets me back on track, focused me on the activity and not the result, even when everything in my core is slathering itself in malaise, uncertainty, or indecision.
I also like to remind myself that the action doesn’t need to be The Perfect Action. It just needs to be An Action, which gives you to feeling of agency, control, choice in the face of the formidable. And choosing to be still for a specific period of time while you gather more information? That’s action, too.
Setting good intentions for tomorrow also helps. I think often of the Francis Bacon quote, “Hope is a good breakfast, but a bad supper.” (Of course, I usually think of this around 4pm or so whilst I cling to the quixotic optimism that I’m going to get The Last Thing I Need to Do done. So, I endeavor each evening to serve myself a better breakfast.
The last thing I do before I go to bed is check my schedule for the next day, and mentally walk through and schedule in time to complete my tasks, be present for others, and take steps towards my personal and professional goals.Nothing is more beautiful than an organized day and a clean slate morning. My husband has come to learn that “If it’s not on the calendar, it doesn’t exist.” To wit, I schedule in shower time after a workout, picking up my kids, and answering email, all things which would either be forgotten (eek, sorry kids!) or expand across the day (gah, email!) if unchecked.
Oh, I’m that person who puts the thing on my to-do list that I have just done, even if it wasn’t on there before. Because who doesn’t like a little added accomplishment in their pursuit of non-perfection.
Why this photo? To remind you not to take everything so seriously.
