I do not know by what skill I am able to give good advice. It’s a blessing for sure.
I just wish I could follow my own advice more often.
— ا (@th_mnmlst) December 27, 2015
The preceding tweet followed a meeting with one of my best friends, which lasted three hours. We covered a substantial amount of topics, digressions, and debated multiple points of view (and had more than a few cups of mint tea). There are some people who I yearn to spend time with, and he is one of those. 3 hours of just talk wasn't enough. For meetings like these, even when a lot of time is spent, it always feels, when we part ways, that there was so much more to be covered, and we were just getting started. I am so grateful for this and a few other friendships. It almost makes the various traumas of my early and mid-twenties worth it if the end result will be relationships like these on the other side.It was at the end of the talk where I was able to give him some concrete advice. And we covered the ways in which people give advice, and they ways in which the said advice is received, if it is ever acted upon, and the innate problems of such.
I shared a few insights with him, and this is the reason, I am writing this post. I am writing these for myself to refer back to, because I know I will forget these insights soon. If anyone else benefits from these, then this is a bonus, and I am grateful for it.
They are as follows:
- As a rule, people make decisions emotionally, and then post-justify them logically. This has been proven enough times by behavioural economists*. The ramifications of this are many, and I do not remember them all, but this then leads to the following conclusions:
- Humans are less logical than they think when it comes to decision making, and, therefore...
- We actually have very influence in the day-to-day, brick-by-brick shaping of our lives, because we do not think every choice through logically.
- Amongst the human race, the pure logicians, who make and follow every decision logically, are rare.
- The basic underpinnings of economics and economies as the aggregate effects of millions of rational decision-makers seems like a not-so-stable foundation upon which elegant theories are built upon.
- For the majority of the choices that we make in our daily lives, there is often very little difference in choice A and choice B. What I mean is that, if most decisions can be post-justified after the fact, then really most decisions aren't really worth agonising over, and we can use that to our advantage.
- If the above is true for most of us, then what we should do is build good habits that run on autopilot and take us to where we want to go. This is the only thing that trumps emotional decision-making in the moment - again this is also proved by behavioural psychologists.
- Do not try to understand humans as logical, clear-thinking human beings. This is the ideal, it is the pinnacle of the complete human being, but I do not think anyone who is fallible is there yet. Those that are, well, I am rarely in contact with, so again the rule holds true.
- If I do not try to understand human beings as logical, clear-thinking types, then I must try to understand them as emotional beings who occasionally can think and make logical decisions. If I try to do that, then I will look and see people differently, approach them differently, and try to understand their needs and wants and motivations before anything else.
- Intuition is important. I cannot count how many times I have ignored my gut feeling and regretted it later. Therefore, for the big decisions of your life, make both your heart happy, and your brain happy.
- The ego is an invisible and powerful obstacle to humbling yourself and accepting good advice. We are always good lawyers for ourselves and harsh judges for others. This is because we innately, emotionally, and by default value ourselves as worth more than the people around us. I can see that the instinct for self-preservation may have it's benefits on occasion, but beyond that, there is also a need for us to believe that we have some worth in the story of our own lives. If we believe that we are the central character, and that the other characters are bit-part players or even major players but not the central hero, then we are still always going to have some bias towards ourselves.
- The trick, then, to accepting good advice, and to knowing what good advice is, is to remove yourself (and your ego) from the equation.
- The way that I have found that works is to imagine that a very close (yet generic) friend is going through the exact same problem or dilemma that you are going through. You haven't assigned a name or a face to this "friend" so you don't know his/her nuances of character or emotional feelings. You are not involved directly, so your ego can take a back seat. Furthermore, you genuinely want to help, so you will give the best advice as you see fit, and this is part of the innate goodness that exists in the soul, to want to help others. That this is just a logical exercise with no effort involved makes it easier still.
- These conditions create the best, clearest, most logical advice, and when you then apply that advice to your own situation, you will find yourself making emotional excuses as to why this indeed is very good advice, but you can't apply it to your situation because of Excuse X or Rationalisation Y. The fact remains, however, that you gave the best advice when your ego was not involved.
- This then ties in with the default ability of humans to make decisions emotionally, and then post-justify them rationally after. And to be fair, I am sure that Reason X has some validity, and Rationalisation Y has very good merit, but, once you know that you are not following the best decision, it is hoped that you will put these aside and actually follow your own advice.
I say that it is hoped, because, as good as I am at giving advice, I still, knowing all the above, struggle to follow it myself, and verge on self-sabotage more often than not. Maybe this year will be the start of a change.
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* The book Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely is a very good starting point if you're interested further in irrationality and behavioural economics.
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Wishing my handful of followers a 2016 full of growth to realise the God-given potential you know you innately have.
My good friend Hasanali (aka Dave, and not the friend I met for 3 hours at the start of this post) has encouraged me to start writing more, so I will try. I'm going to try to post every Sunday, so maybe Mondays will be a good day to visit the blog.
