Here’s something I hadn’t really thought much about. I always thought I was a pretty competent decision maker. I know some people have trouble making decisions. And it isn’t surprising to me that change efforts may stall because we avoid making decisions. This is because the decisions we must make often involve trade-offs: In order to get something we want, we have to give up something else. We don’t like to do that when it’s a choice between two things we want. This idea was recently written about in this article.
The word decide, according to Nick Tasler, the author, comes from the Latin root caidere, which means to kill or to cut. I had to look it up myself in my word stems book. He’s right. In my book, it’s spelled cædere, where the a and the e are smooshed together to form a special character whose name I do not know. That is amazing, that character, but even more astounding to me is that the root of the word decide is related to words like suicide, homicide, and genocide! How did I not know this! No wonder I dislike making decisions!
Instead of making a decision to cut something from our to-do list before we add another activity, we think we can get away with simply adding and not cutting. Earlier today I tried to imagine how I am going to finish my dissertation, work on my business, take care of my mother, and have a social life. Which one shall I give up? Hmm. Sorry, Mom.
Rather than make a decision to cut something, we kick the decision down the road, down the ladder, out of our territory. According to a study by Wang, Novemsky, Dhar, & Baumeister (2010), making the trade-offs required in decision making actually diminishes our mental capacity and ability to make good decisions! Apparently, we only have so much mental capacity, and after a hard day of decision making, our decisions tend to deteriorate into reckless catastrophes. The larger the trade-offs, the greater the depletion of our resources.
This explains why after a day making decisions about what draining task I should be accomplishing next, I go out with a friend, where, faced with so many choices on a shiny colorful menu, I lose all willpower and sense of reason and order the fries. I will never speak lightly of decision making again. Clearly decision making can be a matter of life and death.
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