Why the hard choice is the better choice
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”
— Richard Feynman
We all have the need to feel competent and in control. We want to feel we’re taking the right actions and moving steadily towards our goals. The desire to feel this way can be so overwhelming that we will even lie to ourselves, rather than face the truth and course correct.
Why?
I believe it has to do with misunderstanding what emotions mean. We interpret emotions as direct commands to approach or withdraw a person or situation. We approach what makes us feel good, and withdraw from what makes us feel bad. This strategy works most of the time because emotions are responses learned from past experiences. But sometimes emotions can mislead us.
Emotions are correlated with expectations. They are an indicator of whether our experiences are in line with what we expect. Fear, for instance, is a signal that we are moving out of our comfort zone and into unexplored territory. Sometimes this territory is actually dangerous, but often it’s just someplace unknown. Fear can therefore point towards the hard choice — the thing that’s uncertain but one that could be beneficial for us.
This misunderstanding of fear keeps us limited to a sphere of action where we can feel competent and in control. In such a situation, our focus is not on what is most important to do, but what we find easiest to do. So we continue doing things that give us a false sense of accomplishment, even as the most crucial tasks remain undone.
This ignorance of the hidden role of emotions has another implication: we can fail to realize that there is usually an inverse relationship between the long term impacts of an action and how doing it makes us feel in the present. Something that feels uncomfortable right now will have positive effects in the future. Something done to lessen anxiety and feel good in the moment might have adverse consequences later on.
It’s an undeniable truth that almost anything worth doing requires pain in the short term. This is almost as universal as a law of physics. The world is complicated, there are many variables that affect outcomes, randomness is ever-present, and we are one among many others who have their own desires, some of which are at odds with ours. An unwillingness to accept this fact is a big cause of angst.
We would do well to heed the following advice then:
Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life.
— Naval Ravikant
This is useful advice because life is what happens to us from this point onwards. Hard choices mean we’ve paid the dues that needed to be paid. It means we exercised, ate healthy food, saved money, maintained relationships, and learnt skills, even when we didn’t feel like doing any of these things.
The best time to make such hard choices is when you can take them voluntarily, not when you have them thrust on you. Remember that what you can do easily is not necessarily the most important thing. Sometimes the most important thing is the thing you don’t know how to do, but must do nevertheless.
