Dickie's Digest - First Edition
Friends,
This issue marks the first of what is hopefully many insightful and enjoyable newsletters for many Sundays to come. Over the course of the first few issues, I’ll be varying the structure of the newsletter to see what feels right. Hope you enjoy!
An Idea I've Been Thinking About
Making decisive decisions is difficult. When attempting to do so, we are tasked with balancing many different inputs, opinions, implications, and possible outcomes. This overflow of information is too much for us to process, which is why we are predictably biased decision makers.
One of the most common biases that affect my decision making is the sunk cost bias. When evaluating two possible options, we tend to choose the one we’ve invested more time, money, or effort in the past, even if it is not the best decision for the future. As Seth Godin puts it in this blog post:
When making a choice between two options, only consider what’s going to happen in the future, not which investments you’ve made in the past. The past investments are over, lost, gone forever. They are irrelevant to the future.
We can see this bias everywhere in our own lives. We refuse to throw things out because we spent good money on them in the past. We struggle through books we don’t enjoy because we’ve spent six hours to get halfway through. We stay in relationships for longer than we should because we’ve put so much time and effort into making them work. All the while if we simply forgot everything that’s happened in the past and decided objectively what was best for the future, these decisions would make themselves.
Question I'm Asking Myself
Think about some of the decisions you have coming up. Where is this bias present in your thought process? How easily could you make the decision if you only considered the future implications and forgot the past?
Weekly Favorites
If you’ve never read a blog post by Seth Godin, you’ve been missing out. His ability to pack an entire book’s worth of insight into a small blog post in incredible. Some of my favorites of his:
This episode of the Tim Ferriss Show where Tim and Seth discuss a wide variety of rules, principles, obsessions each of them have. Give it a listen this week if you have the time.
This blog post “Don’t Shave That Yak!”, where Seth perfectly illustrates what can happen if we try and wait for everything to be perfect before we act.
This blog post “Ignore Sunk Costs” that had me thinking about sunk costs in the first place, where he does a much better job than I can in explaining it.