Decision Making 101: Do or Do Not, No Excuses, No Assumptions
What factors into every decision, time horizons, and why even a bad decision can turn out to be a good one.
This post is about making decisions. When making any decision, there are five basic factors to consider:
A) Time: how much time will this take
B) Money: how much money does it cost or pay
C) Benefits/Gains: aside from money, what will be gained by doing the thing
D) Drawbacks/Losses: aside from money, what will I sacrifice by doing this thing
E) Opportunity Cost: what other things could I do with that time or money
“There are no solutions, only trade-offs” - Thomas Sowell
Yoda immediately came to mind when I started writing the headline—I felt almost forced (pun intended) into writing his famous words, “Do or do not, there is no try.”
And that’s good advice. If you are going to do something, you should do it believing and assuming you can, rather than trying half-heartedly. But what comes before that? How do we decide what to do, or not do?
My Yoda-ism, if you will, is: Do or do not, no excuses, no assumptions.
It came to me this morning shortly after I woke up and thought: maybe I should go to church today? I’ve been on a bad road for a while that recently culminated in a miniature disaster1—I’m lucky it wasn’t much, much worse—and if anyone needs God right now, it’s me. Also, I am at least nominally a Christian. Not a very good one to be sure, but I do believe in the rough tenets of the faith:
God is Almighty, human beings are innately flawed, sinners by nature, and therefore we need Grace to achieve enlightenment.
That Jesus came to sacrifice Himself for our sins.
That redemption is possible by following Jesus’ example of compassion, forgiveness, teaching, and healing, for ourselves of course, but most especially for other people.
Anyway, while deciding about whether or not to go to church, I hit upon what has always been the biggest excuse to not go recently, which is that it might get Trumpy. As you might guess, I’m not a fan of the guy—although I’m also thoroughly disgusted with the Left right now and its embrace of Wokeness and identity politics, so I’m in a weird middle place I suspect is occupied by millions of Americans but is never talked about.
Neither Trump nor the Left currently occupy Christian values.2 Jesus Christ was primarily occupied with feeding, healing, teaching, and helping people, especially poor people, whereas the modern Left seems more concerned with what someone looks and what category they fit into than whether we should help them or not. Trump, on the other hand is the least Christian high-profile American I can conjure. Anyone who’s read the Bible or has coherent grasp of Christian ideals understands this. But unlike the Left, Trump and Christianity—at least American Christianity—are practically tied at the hip…which is truly bizarre, and yet true.
Hence the dilemma when confronting my decision about whether to go to church or not: what if it gets Trumpy?
Let’s be honest, it might.
But when I thought about it more, I realized that’s not why I’m going. I’m going to practice my faith, to hear a good lesson or two from the pastor and learn something new. I’m going to talk with other people, to pray and show my thanks for our Creator and His Benevolence. So I should either go, or not go, but I shouldn’t assume anything about the experience is going to happen other than what it is. Could shit get weird? You bet, but that’s true of anything.
So do the thing you want to do for the reason you would do it…no excuses.
If you want to go skiing, go skiing, and expect to ski. You might fall, it will be expensive, and a ton of other stuff might happen that no one in a million years could predict. But you go skiing to ski. So either ski, or don’t, no excuses, no assumptions.
I’m not suggesting we shouldn’t have reasons to do, or not to do things—we should. And if you’re looking for the criteria to consider, it’s all in those five basic factors listed at the top. But don’t let your biases, assumptions, or excuses get in the way of the decision.
To finish, two quick rules that’ll steer you in the right direction when making decisions:
Follow your gut. That’s obviously true for short term decisions, like going to the gym—if you feel like you should go, then go immediately or as soon as you can, the decision is made. However, this is also true for bigger decisions. If you have a gut feeling you should do or not do something, and this feeling is consistent over the course of a few hours to a day, then do or do not, no excuses. Because even if you’re wrong, there’s a silver lining to taking action I’ll come to at the end.
If you’re truly conflicted about whether to do something or not, it’s often a good signal to NOT do that thing. Because if it was clearly the right thing to do, you’d already be doing it. As Mark Manson says, most decisions come down to either FUCK YES or NO. He was saying this in the context of relationships, but I’ve found it’s a good rule to apply to almost any decision.
Time Horizons: Set a deadline for the decision
We’ve all spent time waffling over a decision. This can provoke anxiety, and perhaps worse, delay the making of the decision, because the waters of DO or DO NOT have become so muddy. If you put too much syrup and butter on the waffle it just becomes an inedible pile of goo.
The solution is to set a time horizon for making decisions. How long depends on how long the doing will take.
If it’s something like going to church, the gym, or walking the dog—stuff that takes less than 2-3 hours to prepare, leave, and come back, I resort to the five minute rule: I’ve set a timer for five minutes, and that’s all I get. Time to decide. Because these are decisions that, individually, will have almost zero impact on your life. Doing or not doing won’t in the end matter that much that one time, so if you’re truly unsure what to do, put a timer on for five minutes, sit down, and decide one way or the other.
Now obviously, if you choose not to go the gym every day, you won’t be very fit after a couple months, so it’s important to make those right decisions on a daily basis, but only because the effect is cumulative. Precisely why these types of things should be habits, not decisions. For example, many people take their dogs on a walk around the same time every morning. It’s not a decision, it’s just what they do. These kinds of habits, especially those that are virtuous—like going to the gym 5x a week or taking a 15 minute walk every day or having a daily mediation or yoga practice—are important to build. For more on that, I highly recommend James Clear’s Atomic Habits. And if you have only 10 minutes, Orion Taraban has an excellent podcast episode called Where the battle is won: the ten second conflict.
However, if the decision is larger, like “should I take a week vacation to Maui”, “should I go to college”, or “should I marry this person”, then it’s fair to consider the pro and cons for a longer period of time. There are two categories of these types of decisions:
Life changers: these are decisions you can never be sure about, or that, even if you think you want to do them deep down, the ramifications of that choice are so consequential and/or life changing, it’s worth taking some time to consider. Getting married, having kids, changing careers, etc.
Arbitrary, but expensive: these are life choices that, because they require such a large amount of time, commitment, and/or money, are difficult to make—not because they will change your life, but because there are surely other things you could do with that investment. Going on vacation is a good example. We’re choosing to take a week or two off work, and depending on where we go it could be quite expensive, say $5,000-10,000 when it’s all said and done. However, upon return we’ll basically be the same person we were before and go back to the life we lived with almost no permanent changes—other than a great tan and some fun tchotchkes for grandma.
For the first, the life changing decisions, there is no true time horizon other than those that occur naturally. If you want to have kids, for example, you’ve got til about 35—a bit more if you’re a dude, but then you’re pushing it in terms of being an old dad. However, if you’re not ready to decide on kids, but you want the possibility to be open, you need to prepare a life that is good for children well before that (read: by or before your late 20s), preferably married with a supportive partner and a decent household income.
On the marriage front, the best advice I’ve heard is the old adage that at some point, “it’s time to shit or get off the pot.” Most often it will be the man who buys a ring and proposes—even the most ardent feminists will tell you this is preferred—so I’ll cater this advice to men. The time can be as short as a year or less, or as many as five before you both decide it’s right, but if you’ve been with a woman for that long and you’re still unsure, graciously exit stage left and let her find someone who can be a more enthusiastic partner, especially if she’s told you she wants to have children.
For the ladies, after you beyond high school and college, once your sure this guy isn’t your forever, let him go, especially if you’re way too good for him and that’s why. It’s cruel to let him get to the point where he thinks he’s going to marry you, even more so if he’s talking about it or God forbid buys a ring. Don’t let it get that far.3
On the other hand, if you want him to wife you up, be the best loving partner you can be and he probably will. Men will marry women when they realize one or both of the following two things are true:
A) He continues to find her sexually attractive over many months and years
B) He knows that she truly loves him and makes his life better
Quick caveat: in modern society, the desire for children is the best and maybe only good reason to get married, because it protects the kids if the marriage fails. But like, if you don’t want them…why? Nothing is preventing anyone from staying together as long as they want, and unless, as a couple you both REALLY want the State to be involved (I guess lower taxes?), what’s the point?
For the more arbitrary, yet expensive decisions, like vacations, or even if/where one should go to college4, the time to decide depends on the length of the commitment. A rough metric is 10 minutes for every day you’ll spend doing the thing.
If I go fishing on the Deschutes tomorrow, it’s a day long trip, so I have 10 minutes to decide whether to go or not.
If I spend a week in Hawaii, it’s a 7 day trip, so I have 70 minutes.
If I’m a high school senior who’s thinking about whether to go to college or not, college lasts roughly four years—not counting breaks, it’s 39 weeks/year = 273 days/year x 4 = 1,092 minutes. So I have about 20 hours to make this decision.
For each day I’m actively deciding what to do, I should spend at least five minutes thinking about it. I can spend as much time thinking about whenever I want to of course, but once I meet that upper threshold of overall time, it’s time to make a decision. And as above, remember the Manson rule: if you’ve come to the end of this time and it’s not enthusiastically yes, don’t do it.
Full send: whatever you choose, go all in and commit to doing the best you can to make that decision a good one.
Once you’ve committed to doing something, DO IT. Full send. Go hard. Commit to the doing.
This is a mistake I’ve made way too many times in my life…eh, I’ll do a little bit of This, then a little of That, but plan on doing This Next Thing, even though This and That will prevent me from doing This Next Thing well or even at all.
The great thing about life is that if you go all in, you get an answer very quickly. In some cases it’s immediate: you drive to yoga class, but see that the studio is closed. Sometimes it takes a bit longer—maybe you go to college and realize after about six to seven weeks, as I did, that biochemistry sucks and it’s way more fun to party with your friends. But once you commit to a certain path, you’ll know in fairly short order whether it’s right or wrong.
And once you get the answer, you can choose to stay on the path because it’s working, take a fork in the road and do something slightly different, or get off the path entirely to do something different. Yoga class is closed—welp I’m already dressed to workout, I’ll go to the gym. College isn’t for you? No worries, you can: change majors, change colleges, drop out, get a job, or travel abroad. The benefit of taking action is that you learn best by doing. That’s true of everyone I’ve ever met.
Seth Godin said something amazing related to making decisions in a recent podcast with Tim Ferriss:
We should not deny that games exist. We should learn how games work. And when we make a move in a game that doesn’t seem to work, we should not say we are a bad person. We should say, I made a move that did not work. Those are totally different things. And so the only way you’ve been able to achieve all the things you’ve achieved between the archery, and the dancing, and everything in between, is you make more moves than most people, and you measure them and you don’t do the ones that don’t work again.
By making moves—by deciding—we learn both what to do, and what not to do. We learn what moves work for us. The only limits we have in life are time, mortality, and our physical abilities. The most successful people make a lot of moves. They also fail a lot more than most people, but that’s why they become so successful. A bad decision is simply an opportunity to learn something new.
Whatever your circumstance are, wherever you live, whatever amount of money you have, whatever your age may be, etc., the only thing you can do is take control of your life by making the best decisions you can.
In The Lord of the Rings, Frodo says of the Ring and his circumstances: “I wish it need not have happened in my time.
“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
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I will elaborate on this more at some point, but the state of my life currently, is rather dreadful. However, I feel more than qualified to make the points I’m making here and to write a blog giving advice generally, because I’ve made far more moves and seen far more stuff relative to my time on the earth than most people. If you read to the end, with the Seth Godin quote, you’ll get it.
Which is fine: politics really shouldn’t be involved in our religion—indeed, there’s almost always trouble and violence when the two are intertwined.
And for the love of God, don’t cheat on him to end it. Some men do this too, but I’ve seen it done far more often by women, that when they are finished with a relationship, they find a new person before they leave to replace the relationship they are losing, and are either emotionally or physically cheating with the new guy before they tell the other guy he’s out. Regardless of sex/gender, don’t do that. Not only is it unbelievably callous and cruel, but it tends to leads to a worse result, because you’re choosing Mr. Right Now, not Mr. Right.
Some people might argue that this is more of a life changing decision, but if we examine it more closely it’s really not. There’s no doubt that going to college can and should lead to life changing experiences and growth, but a person will also learn and have life changing experiences and growth doing whatever they do that does not involve going to college. And while surely it’s more fun to be around people who are your own age, that will largely be the case that however old you are—that the people you’re around are mostly in your age cohort. Moreover, one can always go back to college to get a different or more advanced degree.