Have you tried talking to people who work in those fields? Asked them if you can shadow them for a day, to see what the working life is like? Say you’re deciding what career to enter. Hard decisions may not admit trial-and-error, but they often allow for research. If you feel regret, it points in the other way.
If you feel relief, that’s the direction your intuition points. Once the decision has been “made,” ask yourself whether you regret not being able to take another. One way to check it is through what’s informally called a “Freudian Flip.” This technique says to assign each decision to a flip of a coin (or dice, if there’s more than one option). This is because if your intuition were obvious, the decision would feel easy. However, knowing your intuition is often difficult for hard problems. Intuitions also help us avoid problems of self-conscious signaling, so we may pick the option we really “want” more, even though we can’t rationally justify it. Thus we often reason from sophisticated patterns that aren’t consciously visible to us. One reason this works is that our intuitions encode our past experiences. However, there’s some sophisticated psychology behind making intuitive guesses. Going with your gut sounds like a lazy decision-making strategy.
That won’t calculate the love for your future children, but it will make you aware of any sacrifices required. For instance, you may weigh the costs and benefits of having kids right now based on the costs and disadvantages and see if those are ones you can bear. That’s why this is just one decision-making method, not the whole decision-making method. However, by looking starkly at the numbers, you can get a better sense of whether it’s actually so bad to go into engineering rather than botany.
This bloodless analysis won’t always yield the correct answer. One way of evaluating this choice is by figuring out, what your chances of passing are, what the average career earnings are for each field and adjust it based on your preference between those fields for non-monetary compensation (say from working in a more glamorous career). This is often valuable when your intuition is conflicted, or there are quantitative matters to consider that your intuition might not be considering.įor instance, let’s say you’re deciding what to major in school. The first method is to explicitly use reason in your decision-making process. If you get agreement among different methods, that’s evidence that one side is the better choice (given the information available). In these cases, it’s often best to use a few different methods and see which choices they suggest. If they were, then choosing would be routine, instead of hard. Unfortunately, there’s no perfect algorithm for making these kinds of decisions. The hardest decisions in life, therefore, afford little opportunity to reconsider. Much of the complexity of life is reduced by learning from experience.
#Making hard choices how to
Many different factors determine which choice is correct, and it’s not clear how to weigh or integrate them. It’s not clear how to evaluate the decision.Decisions often become hard, then, when we look to the world around us and no suggestion is offered. Our cultures often nudge us to make hard decisions by making one answer the default. There’s more than one (socially) acceptable answer.In particular, they’re hard for a few reasons: Where should you go to school? What should you study? Whom should you marry? Should you have kids? Where should you live?
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