Our brain uses these shortcuts to lower the mental effort it takes to get through the day. When you encounter a task or situation, your unconscious brain runs a quick analysis of the importance and possible outcome of the task. If the cost of choosing incorrectly is high then the conscious brain will jump in to make sure the best possible decision is made, however, if our unconscious places a minimal value to survival on the decision (that is if you make the wrong decision it won't lead to large consequences such as the loss of life, or losing a good friend, or your house, money etc.) Because of this, when we make big decisions in our life, our conscious brain steps in and we begin the tedious process of thinking about how we are going to bring up an issue with our friend or what investment strategy we are going to take we consciously plan because we are afraid of losing something.
On the other hand, most of our decisions on a daily basis are small and seemingly insignificant. If we are wrong we will only lose a little bit and if we are right we will only gain a little bit. The danger with this assumption is that if we don't correct or adjust our assumptions, we can make poor decisions that over the course of time can accumulate into big problems.
Most of us don't gain a bunch of weight off the decision to eat one meal. It is the sequence of decisions over days, months, and years. Most of us don't get out of shape in a day, it is the sequence of small choices that lead to not going to the gym for days, months, and years. We don't become broke at retirement by making one large financial error, we chose to spend and not save each day, week, month and year. When all of these decisions are combined over the course of a lifetime, it is no wonder if a person becomes overweight, unhealthy, and broke.
In the last few blog posts I talked about awareness and how important it is to be aware if you want to make any changes. One of the areas we need to be aware of is our biases and heuristics. Over the next few blogs, I will lay out some common biases and heuristics. Just being aware of them will go a long way to improving your shortcutting ability.
Andrew Zimmermann
twitter: @andrewzimbd