The Fastest Way to Know What You Really Want in Any Decision

There's been patients who, maybe through accidents or basically had a brain injury that didn't enable them to feel their feelings, like fundamentally, like couldn't access their feelings. And what they discovered about— there's a man in particular I'm remembering, he literally couldn't make decisions.

Mm-hmm.

Like the question they'd ask him, like, what would you like for lunch? And it'd be hours and hours of looping and trying to rationalize and analyze and figure out what he should have for lunch. And what they discovered is that we literally, we human beings, we make decisions emotionally. Like, without our emotional system, we are incapable of making choices. So, it made it really apparent to me that we actually make decisions emotionally and then we rationalize them.

Hmm.

So, all the rational stuff is really just A little bit of smoke and I don't want to overstate it. There's times where we could do an analysis that's useful, but still, at the end of the day, what leads to that moment of okay, I'm doing this is some feeling.

Right. I've heard people say before that we all make emotional decisions and then we look for a rational alibi.

Oh, that's a good yeah. It's almost like of course I chose that.

Yeah.

She was the better bowler. And it's funny. Robert Rubin, the former Secretary of Treasury, spoke. He spoke at my college graduation, and I still remember he said one of the biggest things people get wrong is that they judge their decisions by the outcomes instead of judging them by the criteria they use to make them. So, there's also a whole mess we make around, I made that decision, it didn't go the way I thought it would, therefore that was a bad decision. Not necessarily. It might have been a brilliant decision. It just went a different way.

Right.

So, if we go into emotion, The way Joe phrases it is, given that we make emotional decisions, let's learn how to make better emotional decisions.

Yep.

And what I have found is that most of our decisions are actually made in order to feel a certain feeling and/or avoid a certain feeling, which can be a trap, right? And okay, should I leave my job, or should I fire this employee? Oh no, when I imagine that, it feels scary. Let's just say fire this employee. I imagine other team members will quit and my— oh no, I shouldn't fire them, right? That's the rational choice.

Bullshit.

It's not, that's not rational. It's just I don't want to feel that fear that arises when I think about it, so I don't do it. And then I rationalize, right? Oh, they're not terrible, they're doing okay. It'll take me a while to find someone. I'm very busy. We need coverage, right?

It'll be disruptive.

It'll be disruptive. Other people will be upset, right? But really, we just don't want to feel that fear. So, one of the most important things you can do to make better emotional decisions, which is just another way of saying better decisions, is learn to welcome and feel all of your feelings. Because if you don't need to avoid feeling any particular feeling, then what that sort of unlocks is more clarity about what you really want, which is what you alluded to earlier. And it's almost like—

it's almost like feelings that you do— don't want to feel are like a straitjacket, and if they're around you, you can't even get out of them. But if they're not there, then you can—

Yeah.

You have more expansive, like, freedom to choose, but also, I guess, clarity. You also can see it more clearly.

Yeah, it's almost like we have a defense mechanism that won't let us access or attune to what we really want if it feels too scary or too upsetting. And so we have to learn to be okay with that upset, with that fear, with that anger, sadness, so that we can even access Or even shame, right? Sometimes people are like, I'm ashamed to actually want this thing because I've been taught I should want this. But really, I actually just want to quit and shut down my company and go to Costa Rica and surf. Oh, but oh no, that's bad. I'd be a loser. You're supposed to endure and fight the good fight.

Right.

And so, there's all these feelings that tend to get in the way of us even attuning to getting clear about what is it that I really want. And from my experience—

Let me interrupt real quick because I got Andrew Warner's ghost in my head being like, hold on, Dave. Hold on. Hold on. You coach all these CEOs. Surely they bring you business problems where they say, hey, should I sell my company to private equity for $500 million or should I sell it to a strategic for $600 million? I don't know. I'm torn. Or even my thing right now is like, should I structure this thing I'm doing as a fund or as a holdco? And here's the different ramifications for those. People bring you what I will describe as business problems. Yeah. And I'm sure that happens all the time to you. I guess, how does that— are those emotional problems or are they just people aren't very strategic? They're not playing 4D chess like Peter Thiel or whatever genius out there plays 4D chess all the time.

From my experience, our authentic wants are the best guide to decision-making because they allow us to live an authentic life, right? Like authentic wants.

When someone brings you a problem like that, how do you— what would you say to them?

First, I would look at what— like, imagine option A, you— we could just take yours— you do a fund structure. Like, what are the feelings that arise when you imagine that?

A real question?

Sure.

I think for me there's some excitement about the, maybe the variety of different types of companies you could get involved with. You get to stay involved in a stage of building, but you're not really part of the company, like ownership, like you are in a holdco. But then like everybody tells me funds are like administratively burdensome and like you got to be fundraising all the time. And then I'm like, oh, my energy drops or I get nervous or afraid that like I don't want to put myself into something that I don't— I don't know, that like feels scary.

So there's excitement and fear. So could you allow yourself to feel all that excitement and all that fear?

Sure-ish, yes.

And to the extent not, at least start by welcoming the resistance and then see. And I don't want to skip over this. If not, you might not be ready to make a choice. It might be better to just explore that. Oh, what's in the way of feeling that I imagine it's more the fear than the excitement you're resisting, or maybe the other way around. Which of the emotions are you resisting?

Probably the fear. I think there, again, I think there's this sub-thread here of not knowing, which oftentimes gets me in like, why don't I know the answer to this? Or why is this?

I'm glad you mentioned that because there's sort of 2 other threads that are open in my mind around this. And that's one, this, there's figuring out Trying to figure out the right answer, so we should talk about that. And then there's the thinking you should know something you don't know, right?

And and even thinking that surely there must be a right answer to this.

Like, and if I was competent, like I would know the right answer. Like I should know. So let's just talk about that specifically because two things: one, life starts to feel like a. quiz in school, right? Where it's like, I gotta get the A, like I gotta choose the correct bubble. So that does a few things. One is it makes these choices more— it makes life feel more binary than it tends to be. So, so often our mind is, when you're making decisions, like, okay, is it A or B, right? And in reality, life is this infinite tapestry. There's probably 10 other, maybe 20 other solutions, or there's an A and B solution, or— So, sometimes the reason we struggle even to answer the question— let's go there for a second— what do you really want is because you perceive you can't have everything you want. So, then you're in this battle of, okay, do I want this part more? Do I want this part more?

Right.

And often, I'll say to clients like, hold on, if you could let go of your limiting belief that there's some trade-off, Right. Like, then what do you really want? And they're like, oh yeah, then I wanna, I wanna, uh, hold co and I wanna have $50 million. And it's like, right, suddenly it's— it becomes clear what you want. It's more just you have a limiting belief that you have to make trade-offs, and so you're— you have this battle about which trade-off you wanna make. So I'm a huge fan of asking clients, like, how could you have it all? So that would be something to think about. And sometimes that's what causes the decision tension is the belief you can't have it all. So now you're just trying to weigh between these 2 different things. And when— and the truth is you want both. That's why it's a, a tough decision, right? I was talking to a client today actually about like the Harvard Negotiation Project where they distinguish between like position-based negotiation and interest-based negotiation. And so in some way it could be useful to be like, okay, these are positions like holdco, Or fun.

That's where my head was going.

Yeah. Yeah. But okay. What's the underlying interest? What is it you believe that a holdco will give you? What is it that you believe a fund will give you? And then you'll get more clear about what is it you really want. And then you might find creative solutions where you can have both and maybe it's some other structure altogether. So that's—

Yeah. Yeah. So one of the traps is definitely getting, thinking you should know the answer when you don't.

Yeah. We just named 2 traps. One is the binary, like either/or thinking.

Yep.

Right? And then the other is, I should know the answer. And it's literally like saying the sky should be red, right? If in this moment you don't know, yeah, and you say to yourself, I should know, it's just, it's just a way you resist reality. Reality should be different. It should be this other way.