Why a Good Decision Can Still Feel Wrong | (#109) Beyond Success: Psychology & Philosophy for Achievers, with David Tian, Ph.D.

Welcome to the Beyond Success Podcast: Psychology and Philosophy for Achievers on the Bigger Questions Behind What You’re Building, and I’m your host, David Tian.

So, imagine this. You’ve made an important decision after considering all the alternatives, hearing all the objections you can think of, and accepting that every option that you make will have some downside. It’ll cost something. You were realistic with your expectations and you believed that you had very good reasons for the decision, and then, after you decided or you made the choice, you felt relief. But then, a few days later or maybe a few weeks later, you began to feel anxious again, and you missed what you gave up. You started to feel some FOMO and you wondered whether the other option would have been better. [00:47.7]

So, you begin reviewing the same arguments again, hoping that visiting them for another round would make the discomfort go away, and occasionally, you do turn up something that you missed the first time, or your investigation brings up something important that somehow escaped you, and sometimes it returns you to the decision that you already made and you pick the other option, even though now you’ve already lost some time or you’ve already put in some money in the other option.

Then if you’ve done that, if you’ve undone a previous decision because of these feelings of anxiety or FOMO, and you undo the previous decision based on what you’ve discovered on this new round of investigation, very likely you will repeat that again and undo that decision as well—and in all of these situations, the circumstances often don’t change. The underlying circumstances and situation haven’t changed. What’s different is the feeling that you are experiencing after you make each of these decisions. [01:55.7]

If you’re judging the quality of your decision or the wisdom of your decision based on how you feel after making the decision, you’ve probably experienced this very toxic cycle. The big error here is the expectation that a good decision will leave you feeling confident about making that decision after you’ve made it so that when grief or fear or anxiety arrives instead, you end up treating this discomfort as if it were evidence that your judgment was bad or had failed, that you made the wrong choice.

But choosing one option doesn’t imply that all the other options were worthless. You can have good reasons for refusing to choose an option and still miss what that option offered you. So, if immediate relief becomes your test of whether you’ve made a good choice, you’ll end up reversing decisions simply to stop that feeling, those uncomfortable feelings of regret or fear, or anxiety or sadness. [02:59.5]

Then, if you reverse the decision based on those uncomfortable feelings, you end up in the original position, but worse off, because now you have wasted time and effort returning to the original problem, the original position with that problem, even after having decided and chosen, come up with good reasons for choosing one or the other.

So, the way out of this toxic cycle and the way to avoid ever getting into this toxic cycle is to distinguish new reasons to reconsider your decision from the pain or discomfort of giving something up that is worthwhile in its own way. [03:40.8]

When you choose Option A instead of Option B, it does not mean that Option B has nothing going for it and that you’ll miss nothing from Option B. But if you have good reasons that have just come up for Option B that are apart from your regret or your feelings about Option B after choosing Option A, then it would make sense to re-investigate, to reconsider your decision—but you’ve got to have a way to distinguish whether these are worthwhile, valid new reasons, or whether your emotions or your discomfort with the painful emotions or uncomfortable emotions that come from making the decision at all are what are driving you. [04:20.6]

So, repeated reconsideration of the same decision ends up costing you attention and time, and will actually affect other people who depend on your commitments. People who depend on you, your partners, your colleagues, your family, your friends, can’t reliably depend on you when you keep flip-flopping from one day to the next.

In the previous couple of episodes, we focused on how to hear the competing concerns in your mind before you can make a wiser choice from a higher place in your mind. This episode concerns how to live with the choice you’ve made when those concerns haven’t all disappeared yet. [04:58.9]

One of the most fundamental principles in making a good decision is avoiding the resulting mistake. I first came across this in Annie Duke’s Thinking in Bets, great book. It’s on my recommended reading list on my website. The resulting bias basically tells us that a bad outcome does not prove that it was a bad decision, so resulting is the mistake of judging a decision’s quality by its outcome.

Our logical cognitive mistake is to think that if the decision resulted in success, then the decision itself was wise, and if the choice results in failure or disappointment, then it was foolish. That’s a mistake. We all choose with incomplete information. We are fallible. We are not God. We don’t have all of the facts and we don’t know how things will work out in the near future, even in the next second.

Many events and factors that go into whether a decision results in success are outside our control and outside our predictability. You can make a good decision, a wise decision, given all the facts available, and still fail, and you can make a careless decision and still succeed. [06:11.3]

The outcome simply tells you what happened. In order to determine whether the decision or the choice was good, you’d have to examine the reasoning and the circumstances, not just what results followed.

Okay, here’s an example. Suppose you have to hire somebody for an important role, so you compare the candidates. You check their references. You examine all of their experience, and so on, and you look into each person’s weaknesses, especially the candidate that you prefer the most. Okay, so then you hire what you think is the strongest person for the job, but then you discover, let’s say six months later, that this hire hasn’t worked out, and you see no way of making it work out. [06:52.3]

Knowing the results now, six months later, with our cognitive bias, will make it more obvious that this person was going to fail at this job, but it didn’t look obvious then. Looking backwards with hindsight, it will make it look more predictable than it actually was. The real question is what you could have reasonably known when choosing at that time, six months ago. Don’t commit the resulting fallacy. Again, the resulting fallacy is judging the quality of the decision based on the result.

Maybe now, with this new knowledge that you could not have known reasonably at that time earlier, maybe with this new knowledge you could reassess your process. Maybe your process missed some essential ability in the role, or the circumstances may have changed in a way you could not have predicted, or an acknowledged risk may have materialized that you didn’t take as seriously back then and could not have reasonably taken seriously back then. So, you could have made the best decision you could have possibly have made back then, and still have resulted in poor results. [08:05.0]

Now imagine the opposite. Imagine hiring someone because you like them a lot, so you skipped all of the checks. You didn’t bother calling any of the references. You didn’t bother vetting anything, and you just liked them, so you hired them, and remarkably, let’s say it turned out well, as far as you can tell. Six months later, they became an excellent model employee.

In this case, you benefited from the result and following your hunch, but you haven’t established that skipping the checks, never checking the references, just going by your hunches, is actually a sensible process. So, learning only from the outcome can end up reinforcing bad practices, bad decision-making methods, and undermine sound ones, good processes.

So, a fortunate result, a lucky result, or a positive result can actually make mistakes harder to recognize, and the more fortunate you are over time, the more dangerous this is, because it makes it harder and harder over time to recognize the mistakes that are still in there that keep compounding. [09:11.0]

Now, having said that, and having respected the resulting fallacy, I want to say outcomes still matter, obviously, because people live with them, obviously, and because they provide also information, feedback. Separating outcome from decision quality isn’t to excuse ignoring failure or not looking at mistakes.

It’s not to excuse repairing any harm that happened, and it definitely doesn’t excuse improving your process with the result as one piece of information that you take into account. But what’s required here to determine whether you made a good decision or not is a more careful examination of the decision itself, with the result being just one factor that goes into that evaluation. [09:56.8]

Now, one particular variation of the resulting fallacy is when we see the result as a feeling. There are many people who judge whether a decision was a good one based on how they feel afterwards. You make the choice, and then you feel awful or negative, or painful in some way, and then you conclude that you must have chosen badly, poorly, wrongly. That feeling may deserve some attention. It might be an important factor that you need to pay attention to, but that doesn’t, on its own, establish the conclusion that that was a bad decision.

Now, distress or discomfort or pain can reflect some overlooked information. It can reflect uncertainty, unpredictability, risk, or it could reflect the loss of something that you valued. Your need to investigate what the actual cause is of those painful or bad emotions is separate from the conclusion that the decision was poor or irrational, or illogical or wrong in some way. [11:00.0]

Okay, here’s an example of this. Imagine someone who wants children, but his partner doesn’t. They care a lot about each other, but weeks and months of repeated, honest conversations about this issue haven’t resolved their disagreement about their future, about whether they want a family together, and it turns out it’s a non-negotiable for both parties and they only come to see this after many repeated, honest conversations.

So, they end the relationship because continuing would require one of them to surrender something central to their hopes and to their identity. Their affection, though, makes leaving, makes splitting up and separating really difficult, right? But that on its own doesn’t make this factor no longer non-negotiable.

So, both of them, after months of reconsideration of reflection, have decided that that factor of whether they’re going to have children trumps their affection for each other. So, they both make a rational choice, and at that time, it seems to them each to be the right choice, and they each have something genuinely good to lose. [12:13.5]

Okay, so what happens afterwards for him? Afterwards, he misses her companionship. He misses their familiar routines and their shared history. He misses the romantic evenings, and he reminisces about all of those romantic times that they had together, and those difficult conversations they had about whether to have children fade into the background. He sets them aside unconsciously, right?

The breakup starts to feel more and more wrong. So, what does he do? He considers returning to her, and in these circumstances, many couples do make the mistake of giving in to the resulting fallacy and get back into the relationship, and then they break up again because nothing has actually changed in the circumstances, and then they go back and forth, back and forth, because this is a difficult decision. Either way, you lose something good that you want. The hard part is deciding which one is more important to you. [13:09.7]

But notice, from a rational point of view, the strength of their attachment is a different issue from whether to have children, okay? This might be obvious, but a lot of people confuse them, thinking they’re one thing and that they just yo-yo or seesaw on the one thing. These are actually two separate considerations. Missing his partner establishes that the relationship mattered to him, but missing his partner does not establish that their disagreement about whether to have children has disappeared or not. [13:40.6]

Sometimes, the real problem isn’t more effort or more motivation. It’s knowing the right direction. A lot of people listening to this podcast are capable and driven. Things still look fine on paper, but life still feels strangely flat. When that happens, more advice usually isn’t the answer. Clarity is.

I’ve put together a short assessment that takes about two minutes. It’s simply a way to see which area deserves your attention most right now, whether that’s relationships, decision-making, or how pressure is being handled day to day. Based on your responses, you’ll be sent a short set of master classes related to that area.

If that sounds useful, you can find it at DTPhD.com/quiz. That’s “dtphd.com/quiz.”

This moves right into the next point, which is that choosing well often will mean giving up something that was genuinely good in the other options. You generally only have to give much thought when the options are all decent, so if it’s just a choice between eating poo or eating this food, you don’t probably have to think too hard about that. When you’re confronted with what you’d consider to be a difficult decision, that implies that there’s good and bad in all the different options that you’re looking at. [14:58.8]

So, whenever I have you think about a decision you want help with, you’re never thinking about one obviously good option and one obviously bad option. Instead, you’re thinking about choices that have competing goods. In this case, affection and parenthood can both matter, but this particular relationship can’t accommodate both.

Here’s another example: ambition. Ambition can create the same problem. An opportunity could offer meaningful achievement, but also require time that you want to give to your partner or your friendships, or your family. Simply recognizing an option’s value doesn’t settle whether you should choose it or not. You still need to examine what accepting it would require you to give up or sacrifice.

One immature response that often happens is that in order to protect us from this feeling, this feeling of FOMO, of regret, from letting go of an option that has some good in it, is that we vilify it. Right? We look down on it. We disdain it to make ourselves feel better, and this makes us feel more secure in the choice we did make. [16:07.5]

Maybe you joke about doing this, but if you don’t, it’s probably good for you to know that this is an unhealthy pattern, right? What happens is a former partner or an ex becomes a villain. Everything she was or represented, or he was or represented, is just bad and evil. This makes it easier for you to be settled in your choice to leave. Or a declined opportunity becomes shallow and pointless and empty. This makes it easier for you to live with your choice.

But obviously, the healthier, more mature response is to acknowledge the other option or that other person’s good qualities, while still explaining and understanding why you chose the other option, why you couldn’t build a future together, in this example. Likewise, declining this opportunity shouldn’t require denying that it had any value, or that there was any pleasure or recognition or contribution in that opportunity you declined. [17:10.3]

You should be able to acknowledge the good in the alternatives that you declined. That’s obviously the healthier, more mature response, and your choice, of course, then doesn’t erase the value of what you have turned down. You might continue missing a person or you might regret missing a possible opportunity, or letting go of that imaginary future that you had in your mind, requiring that that decision that you made eliminates every reason for feeling bad or sadness, or anxiety or regret.

Ask of a wise choice what it cannot provide. Pain proves neither wisdom nor error. What it establishes is that something mattered enough for you to examine and for you to feel these feelings as a result of letting it go. [17:56.7]

Always keep in mind the other cognitive bias of basically like the grass is greener on the other side, right? It always seems more tempting to get what you don’t have. In the breakup example, her companionship, affection, intimacy becomes more vivid when you’ve let it go, and the incompatible future becomes less and less important when you’ve chosen it. This is just part of our cognitive machinery. This is our human bias. So, the antidote is rational, logical investigation, rather than this idealizing of what you gave up.

Now, don’t swing too far to the other side, okay? Like I said earlier, your discomfort, these negative feelings, are themselves a reason to reconsider, and might reveal yet more reasons that you hadn’t taken into account that you should reconsider now. Just thinking that good decisions can hurt should not lead into an excuse for defending poor judgment. Continuing on a path deserves just as much examination as reversing it. Your willingness to tolerate discomfort matters alongside your willingness to admit that your reasons may no longer hold now that you’ve discovered some new information. [19:11.8]

For example, maybe the job that you took that said it was just going to be occasional travel now requires many weeks away, so you’re now evaluating a different commitment from the one that you believed you accepted. You have new information. There are new circumstances and it makes a lot of sense to reconsider.

Or you may understand a cost more fully in a way that you didn’t get at the original time that you made the decision. You might have been anticipating a demanding schedule without understanding how little time it would actually leave for your marriage. Now that you’ve got these months of experience of the result of this option, now you have new consequences to take into account. [19:52.4]

Or you may discover that what you gave up matters a lot more to you than you realized at the time. Okay, that itself is relevant information, new information, even when the actual external circumstances haven’t changed. But remember, recovering what you miss actually might require surrendering something else that you still value that maybe now doesn’t seem as important, but when you give that up, then it seems more important because of our own cognitive biases, right? So, your reconsideration has to examine both sides, rather than simply treating the intensity of your feeling as the end-all, be-all answer for what to do.

Or someone else, another person, might reveal a consequence that you didn’t fully appreciate. They might explain some kind of harm or an obligation that you dismissed at the time. Your positive feelings after the fact don’t establish whether the choice itself was good or justified. Obviously, just because you’re having a good time now that you’ve made this choice doesn’t mean that it was the right choice or that it was a justified choice. Other people’s experiences also belong in your reasoning, especially if you care about those other people. [21:00.8]

So, sadness, resentment, dread, or guilt could be bringing up important information that you didn’t fully appreciate at the time or they could be a reflection of the value in the options that you did decline for good reasons. Expected painful feelings and unexpected costs can coexist in a wise, rational decision, and wise, rational decisions that were wise and rational at the time you made them can also be reconsidered when you get new information. Part of that new information might be how you now feel as a result or how others that you care about now feel as a result. So, you can have good reasons for the original choice and you can have good reasons to change that choice later on.

Learning about something now doesn’t mean that you should have known it six months ago, and if you do reconsider the decision, it’s important that you examine the alternatives that are actually available in the present, rather than assuming reversing the decision restores the original situation. [22:05.6]

Okay, in addition, past spending on its own does not justify further spending, so existing obligations might still require notice or handover, or repair or some other responsible action. You can change without rewriting the past, or you can continue despite uncertainty, because your reasons after reexamination still seem persuasive to you.

Okay, so here is the way to reassess your decision without rethinking it every other night. Okay, first recover your original reasons. Okay, record what you chose back then, why you chose them, what were all your reasons back then, which were the alternatives that you considered back then. This will put you in a more objective state than just simply being in your present mood. [22:54.1]

Okay, so you’ve got to include your priorities back then, your accepted uncertainties back then, your expected losses, predicted losses back then, your responsibilities to others back then, and you might notice that there were some costs that you didn’t appreciate or notice, or didn’t deliberately accept back then that you’ve now incurred as a result of this choice that you’ve made.

Now you look at what you’ve learned as a result or over time. Okay, so this will help you separate your experience from its interpretation, like missing a former partner is an experience. Concluding that you should therefore return requires further reasoning than just the experience.

In looking for what you can learn from this, you’ve got to examine what supports your conclusion beyond just the feeling that you’ve got itself. In our example, the affection you feel for her and missing her matters, but it matters alongside whether the original disagreement about children still remains and whether that disagreement is still important to you. [23:58.9]

Now we look at the grounds for changing the decision or whether to change the decision. We’ve got to determine which, if any, reasons have weakened, which, if any, assumptions have failed, which, if any, consequences changed the balance. If any of that remains unclear, we’ve got to keep investigating it and you can’t treat your feeling of discomfort as a verdict without doing this rational investigation.

Then you’ve got to compare today’s alternatives, including what reversal would cost you, and then on the timing itself—this is important so that you’re not experiencing the pain, the futile pain of flip-flopping every other night—you’ve got to match the review timing to urgency and consequences. So, you’ve got to choose wisely when to actually do this review. Don’t review your decision unless some new consequential information appears.

Okay, between reviews, give whatever decision you chose your full attention while in the back of your mind remaining observant for any new factors that you didn’t take into account or any changed factors. Simply repeating the same arguments every evening will not improve your judgment. [25:10.9]

Now, apart from all of the rational reconsideration, you’ve got to respond directly to the feelings that are coming up. Grief might require connection or company, or good conversation. Fear that’s coming up requires examination, taking it seriously, seeing whether it’s based on some objective facts or whether it’s purely subjective and then you can still deal with that. The feelings themselves need addressing.

A great way to address them is through a psychotherapeutic approach. That, after all, is what sex therapy is geared to. It’s focused on the feelings and the underlying thoughts. Don’t fall into the fallacy of thinking that addressing the feeling requires changing the entire decision. Feeling lonely may not mean that you’re supposed to get back together with your ex. It might just mean you need more friends, okay? [26:03.5]

That feeling of guilt might be telling you that you should apologize or repair, or change your conduct, depending on what happened. It does not, on its own, mean that you need to reverse the decision. Whether you should reverse that decision depends on the reasons for that decision, not on how you feel as a result of the decision.

Okay, and so here’s a quick action step. Choose one difficult decision that you’ve reconsidered repeatedly. Okay, record your reasons back then, your discoveries since that time, and any new grounds for changing your decision. After you’ve done that, take the next supported action. It’ll be quite obvious to you once you’ve done that work. [26:46.8]

If the feelings that have come up as a result of what still seem to you to be a rational, good decision, are really hard to manage or deal with or feel overwhelming, this is a sign that you need to seek a professional to help you with those feelings, to help you work through them and discover some of the underlying reasons for why they persist, keeping in mind that those reasons, on their own, may not be good reasons for reconsidering or reversing your decision.

Okay, so let’s recap here. A disappointing outcome requires examining both the original reasoning and what whatever contributed to the result, the outcome or the result alone cannot tell you how good of a decision it was, and any negative feelings afterwards do deserve investigation, but they do not automatically require you or should be obeyed or dismissed. Just because you’ve uncovered new information now does not mean that the original choice you made was unreasonable. [27:46.8]

I just want to briefly highlight the negative consequences of giving in to the resulting fallacy. Let’s take that previous breakup example. Okay, so returning to your ex whenever the loneliness hurts you will only end up producing repeated breakups, while the original disagreement remains unresolved. You might get immediate relief out of this, but the immediate relief can consume years that both of you could have spent pursuing more compatible futures or happier futures. [28:17.4]

Repeatedly reversing your decisions ends up damaging self-trust, but also the trust of others, and can often prevent worthwhile opportunities from developing, because you kind of just stay in place by going back and forth. Similarly, not taking into account new information, not reconsidering decisions, refusing to do so, stubborn continuation, let’s say, ends up creating the opposite danger. You ignore important evidence. You neglect new responsibilities that you didn’t appreciate at the time. You result in mounting harm to others and to yourself. [28:52.7]

So, neither endless reconsideration, okay, nor refusal to reconsider is responsible decision making or responsible commitment. Being able to think more clearly about your decisions now, being open to re-evaluating them in the future, being observant and monitoring for new information, including feelings as part of that information that come up over time that might give you valid reasons to reconsider—all of these skills of decision making are required for a fulfilling, empowered, happy life and relationships and connections.

So, I hope you have enjoyed this episode. If you have any feedback whatsoever, I’d love to get it. Leave a comment. Send me a message. Love to get your feedback. If you liked it, hit a like or give it a good rating on whatever platform you’re listening to this on. If this has helped you in any way, please share with anyone else that you think could benefit from it.

Thank you so much for listening. I look forward to welcoming you to the next episode. Until then, David Tian signing out. [29:49.0]