Picking Rules To Live By...
Picking Rules To Live By...
Creating a process to pick the rules I choose to live by.
Note: My editor reviewed this post and commented “No one puts this much effort into making decisions. You don’t even do this yourself.” She was right. I only put in the heavy lifting and serious decision science for serious and impactful cases. For the everyday challenges I do a quick triage to make sure that I am treating the choice appropriately and then, assuming it doesn’t have the potential to really foul up my life, I rely on my personal habits, experience and rules of thumb.
The point of this post is to put great habits and rules into the mix. To do that, here’s how I’m choosing them.
In my last post, we looked at positioning and how selecting great rules of thumb can help us to always move toward better positions without wasting effort where it won’t do as much good. I picked three examples to start with. Let’s dig into these three a little further before we get into how to select your rules.
You are responsible. No matter what happens, whether it’s due to your planning or to random chance, accept that you have full responsibility for your actions and your reactions to events. This puts you in the frame of mind to take advantage of opportunities and overcome obstacles.
Look before you leap (Triage). Step back. Take a breath. Now take a moment to triage this decision (or problem). Is it impactful to you or others? Will it have long-lasting effects? Deciding this tells you how much effort the decision deserves.
Don’t do stupid! (Risk Management). If a choice has a 95% probability of success, it has a 5% probability of failure. Failure will happen one time out of 20. That’s a great bet if you can afford to lose the money. If losing can bankrupt you it’s a sucker bet. Always play to stay in the game. This includes bets on money, friendships, health, or anything else. The game isn’t fun if you’re not alive to play.
I picked these rules as examples only. There are thousands we could examine, and this is a good place to start.
What Criteria Should I Use?
I have collected hundreds of unexamined rules of thumb, but some are generic, not broadly useful, contradictory, or can’t be acted on. In an earlier post, I mentioned some criteria for selecting only the most useful ones.
Here are my current criteria for deciding which rules I’ll try to keep. No single rule covers everything, but any good rule should touch on most of them. I look for a rule to be generally applicable and it should be easy to remember.
Does this rule reliably improve my chances of a good decision? Is it better than a coin flip? An example is taking investment advice from a broker. They have a worse return on average than chimps throwing darts, and they make their money even when I’m losing mine. (Perverse incentives are a bitch.) I can reliably do better by picking a stock index fund, a bond index fund, and other investments.
If the rule doesn’t pass this first test, discard it or find a better one. No need to proceed unless it passes this test.
Does it position me better for the future? Good positions create options, while bad positions reduce them. You don’t have to be an expert decision-maker to get better results, you need to put yourself in a better position. What a better position means can be hard to define but having skills, savings, education, and health are examples.
Can this rule be acted upon or used as a trusted guide? Otherwise, it’s just an aspiration or perhaps a direction to travel. “Go big or go home” is an example of a useless rule because it has no sensitivity to context, just blowing sunshine. Similarly, “The nail that stands up gets hammered down.” is just an encouragement to blend in. Neither is appropriate in some cases. A better example is: “Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act (Called the OODA loop).
Does this rule encourage me to think through more alternatives? Does it help find possible win-win solutions? Sometimes the best choice is to simply do nothing. Most choices aren’t simple binary yes/no choices.
Does it minimize harm or risks to me or others? Running a pilot project is an example of risk management, setting up guard rails is another example.
Is it prosocial? Hurting others hurts me too.
Does this rule fit into a systematic approach to making good decisions in general, even for trivial things?
Can I make this a habit so that my default mode is to make the right choice?
Does it increase my learning, skills, or understanding? Does it help me learn from my own mistakes? Examples: reflecting on the day’s work. One of my favorites for years has been “Follow the Money”. It helps me understand what incentives people have and lets me respond knowing they have personal agendas.
Is it a rule I’m willing to pre-commit to? Some rules will have exceptions but the mechanism of precommitment means that any rule I’ve committed to will need a solid reason to override. It also means I will need to review that rule to decide if it should continue to stand. I can commit to a certain course and put that into practice until it becomes my nature. This final rule turns a guiding rule into an appropriate set of actions and, eventually into habits.
I should mention here that I’m just like most people, that is to say, I’m pretty lazy. No way in hell I’ll work through all these steps whenever a decision needs to be made. So, I plan to filter my “candidate” rules (maybe with an AI) to eliminate the least useful ones and organize the rest into a cohesive “Operating System” for myself. Also, no way am I going to drag you along through that entire process, so I’ll just present an example.
For example: “Thou shalt not kill”, which should be more accurately stated as “Thou shalt not murder.” seems like a good starting rule.
Will it reliably improve my chances of a good decision? Murder is rarely the best choice that can be made.
Does it position me better? Yep, better to not be on a wanted poster.
Can this rule be acted upon? No, but in this case NOT doing something is entirely the point.
Does this rule encourage me to think of better alternatives? Yes. It doesn’t offer much advice about what to do instead but that leaves open a very wide range of actions.
Is it a rule that helps or minimizes harm? Check.
Can I make this a habit? Pretty sure that is possible.
Does it increase my learning, skills, or understanding? No, but this rule is batting way above average already.
Does it reduce risk? Obviously
Is it a rule I’m willing to pre-commit to? I have no problem with killing to defend someone, including myself, or in defense of my country, but murder is off the table. So yes. This rule easily makes the Operating System Handbook.
Strategy first. (Actually, done second in this case, but whose post is this anyway?)
My overall objective is to be the best person I can be and live my best life, according to my interpretation of what those are. Having an objective without a plan to deal with obstacles is just an exercise in magical thinking. So, I ask myself “What are the obstacles and what is my plan of action to address each one?”
Human nature - my own biases, weaknesses, blind spots, positioning, and habits.
For important, permanent, or very impactful choices, get good at Decision Science. Learn to triage decisions so the important ones get proper attention. Think like a scientist.
For everyday choices, ***create a set of rules*** to act as guides and make it a habit to follow those rules unless there’s a compelling reason. Get into the habit of doing the right things.
Random chance - How will I take advantage of luck, whether it’s “good” or “bad”?
Position myself well and always be looking for ways to improve my position on every important dimension such as health, relationships, finances, or learning.
Learn about probability and risk management. Prepare for things to go sideways and be ready to help the people I care about.
The laws of the universe - No magical thinking. Reason from first principles but keep second-order impacts in mind. When you run into things you cannot affect, think of those as “gravity” problems. You can’t change the law of gravity, but you can still find ways to fly.
In this post, I tried to share what I think is a good approach to selecting the “rules” I will plan to follow. I’ll be making a pre-commitment to myself and working to make the rules I pick an ingrained part of my character. I chose a basic strategy (objective, plus direction to reach the objective, plus plans to deal with obstacles) and starting criteria for my rules. Then I ran an example rule through the filter of those criteria.
Please give me your advice about how to improve. You already know that I don’t murder (see rule #1), so climb on board, toss out some candidate rules, subscribe, share, and do some good.
In my next post, I’ll stray off the path of decision-making for a bit and pass on some of the things I’ve learned as a teacher. (of both adults and children). I’ll also answer the question “Who is the best teacher in the world?”