How to Choose a Life Path You Won’t Regret

So apparently four out of ten adults regret their life choices these days and I don't think this is because their life choices were objectively wrong or bad necessarily. Instead I think it's because these days we're shown so many different options for what life could look like. Every time we open social media or go on the internet we are bombarded with hundreds if not thousands of different life choices that we could have maybe at some point gone down. There's cottage life in the Spanish countryside or digital nomading in a camper van through New Zealand or even the glitzy corporate life of working at Goldman Sachs and so seeing all these options we get stuck in a paradox of choice. And so decision making about big life changes or anything really in our lives can feel more paralyzing than ever. And I came across a paper that actually brought up something quite interesting and highlighted some of the newest decision making research which shows that actually it is possible to make decisions that you feel confident in and feel that sense of self-trust and it's all based around what researchers refer to as satisficing also known as good enough decision making. If you're new here my name is Izzy, I'm a mum, tech co-founder and Cambridge trained doctor and on this channel we talk about the mindsets and strategies to help you create a life that you love. In today's video I'll walk through nine super simple but highly effective decision making tools so your 80 year old self has nothing left to wonder about. As a companion to this video I've created a completely free summary guide to help you choose which decision tool to use when. So by the end of this video you'll know how to make decisions without actually waiting for a perfect answer which often never comes and finally get moving. I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch like a fat purple fig a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was an amazing editor and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America and another fig was Constantine and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion and beyond and above all these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree starving to death just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them but choosing one meant losing all the rest and as I sat there unable to decide the figs began to wrinkle and go black and one by one they plopped to the ground at my feet. When I first came across this fig tree analogy it resonated so deeply with me the idea that every one of us has all of these different figs or possible lives and yet because we can never quite do everything we can never do everything that's just the nature of life choosing one life feels like leaving all the others behind but I think it's even worse now because social media has multiplied these figs a hundred or even a thousand fold where seemingly every possible fig is laid out in front of you and there are even figs that you wouldn't have been able to imagine on your own that have now been handed to you in the form of some kind of reel or post on social media. Some videos which I saw recently made me think oh like I guess I could totally be a girl boss or I could actually be a full-time mom or maybe go be a digital nomad or be a yoga teacher or be a life coach or do all of these different choices but we become paralyzed by all of these options just like the shoppers in the infamous paradox of choice study on jam jars by Sanford and Columbia researchers. When a group of shoppers were given 24 different jams to taste test versus another group that were given only six to taste the first group ended up around 10 times less likely to actually choose a purchase and so we're presented with the age-old question of how we can choose the right fig for us. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development define transformative life decisions along five key dimensions. These five are firstly conflicting cues so these are values that can't be actually measured on the same scale so things like weighing the value of making more money against the value of spending more time with your baby. The second one is change of self so how much we believe a decision will actually change our beliefs and values. The third dimension is uncertain experiential value where you don't quite know how it would truly feel until you actually get there. For example becoming a parent is famously difficult to predict how it will actually feel until you actually get there. The next dimension is irreversibility which is essentially how easily can you reverse a decision once you've already made it and so usually the bigger the transformative decision you've made the less easy it is to reverse it. For example like undergoing a major surgery versus just having a haircut. And the final dimension is the risk so the possibility of significant physical mental social or financial harm from a certain decision. And so every decision that we're faced with will have a different dimensional profile with these five characteristics but in general the more dimensions that are involved the more transformative and higher stakes the decision is likely to be. So one trap that's easy to get stuck in is the trap of optimization because who wouldn't want to make sure they made the best possible decision at every single crossroad. But the problem is that the real world and our real lives are big and messy and complex and so assuming that we can reduce a big life decision down to a simple number or calculation of expected value doesn't really work. So instead the latest research is focusing more on good enough decision making and satisfying. Essentially there are three key reasons why good enough decision making can work in our favor. Firstly is computational plausibility which basically means is it realistic for you to actually figure this out. If we're going down the route of trying to optimize and overthink every single decision that's actually not very realistic to actually figure out for every single decision in our lives because that's going to take a huge amount of resources and time to actually be able to do that accurately. And so actually a simpler strategy ends up being a lot more beneficial for our lives overall. Secondly is performance in uncertainty. In an uncertain world where there are so many variables ahead of us that we literally cannot predict. If we could predict them we'd probably be able to bet on the stock market and make loads of money but we cannot and so actually simple good enough decision making frameworks actually work surprisingly well when we're faced with this uncertainty. Thirdly is subjective well-being. Let's be honest putting tons and tons of effort into finding the maximally optimal choice is actually exhausting. It might be detrimental and make us less satisfied about our lives. So you might be thinking great how do I make satisfying decisions instead of maximizing ones? If you're a bit like me and a recovering maximizer then in the next couple of sections I'll be walking you through exactly how researchers recommend us to make these good enough satisfying decisions across each of these different five dimensions that I talked about earlier. What I found helpful is to basically create a dimension profile and rate each dimension on the scale of one to five for any big decision that we're facing and then for the dimensions that rank the highest for that specific decision select the decision strategy that fits it the most. Firstly dealing with conflicting cues. This is essentially when in a decision there's various different compromises and trade-offs between different categories of things. So it's not an apples to apples comparison it's actually an apples to oranges comparison. This can feel really difficult to make decisions in. The first way to approach this is elimination by aspects. So this is a narrowing down strategy where you list the requirements that you care about, so these are the aspects, rank them by importance and then throw out any option that doesn't meet your top priorities one by one. A real world example of this is my husband Ali and I chose to move away from London and so we're trying to figure out oh where should we go? And obviously we could basically move almost anywhere in the world and so we applied a bunch of filters that we had and eliminated places based on that until we were left with literally only three cities and then the final choice was a lot easier. The second strategy here is thirst for confirmation. This is essentially a double check strategy where you continue looking for reasons until you have at least two consistent pieces of evidence that favour the same choice. This is great to use when a decision feels too heavy to base on just one thing and so you want a second green light to feel safe and certain in that decision. So one example of this is let's say there's a mother who is deciding whether she wants to have a third baby or not. Maybe she notices that she feels relief at the thought of stopping at baby number two rather than feeling sad but then let's say her doctor tells her oh maybe she's high risk for having another pregnancy. These two consistent cues could confirm her choice. When I was struggling to make the decision on whether to switch from being a doctor to dive into content creation and eventually running a business full time I used this exact thirst for confirmation double check strategy. I learned a lot through the journey but one thing I wish I'd understood sooner is that the creators whose work compounds the most aren't necessarily the ones working the hardest or getting the most views. They're usually the ones who set up an intentional system and let it run and that's why I want to talk about Stan's store who are very kindly sponsoring today's video. Stan is an all-in-one storefront where you can create and sell digital products, sell coaching, put your social media links and basically allows you to connect your social media or your creative stuff to an actual place where you can build a business and actually make money. The creators that have scaled their businesses and are making the most money on Stan tend to make the most out of two specific features and these are funnels and order bumps. So Stan have recently upgraded the features here so let me walk you through a couple of the updates. The first thing is in their funnels so when a potential customer comes through but decides to say no to your main offer, the main thing that you're selling, instead of letting them which means you miss out entirely, they can automatically get directed to what's called a down sell so a smaller offering, a smaller purchase which they might say yes to. Then you've also got order bumps and upsells which mean that you can add a single check box at the checkout that can easily add 20 or even 30 dollars onto what they've already bought where they just opt in to buy an extra little add-on. So if you're building something creative alongside the rest of your life or perhaps thinking of getting started and building a business around it and making some money online you can try Stan with a 30-day creative pro trial at the link in the description down below. Now let's get back into the video. The second dimension is change of self. Whenever a decision might involve a significant change of self, a change of identity, you need to do a little bit of imaginary time traveling and here's what I mean. The first technique here is very creatively named minimax inaction regret. It basically means imagining yourself in the future and choosing the path that minimizes the regret you would feel specifically for not taking action. A real world example is Jeff Bezos. He used this strategy when deciding to quit his cushy high-paying job as a vice president at a wall street hedge fund to go and start Amazon. Working on his garage to build this company Amazon and bet on an uncertain future didn't exactly sound glamorous but he knew that at age 80 he wouldn't regret failing at this internet business as much as he would regret never having tried at all because research shows that while we regret what we judge to be bad decisions in the Our biggest long-term regrets come from missed opportunities, the things that we didn't do, the actions we didn't take rather than the bad ones that we did. The next technique in this category is ideal self-realization and this bases a choice on a single internal goal which is basically identifying the path that manifests a feature essential to who you aspire to be. This means that instead of doing pros and cons lists you actually ask yourself which choice matches the person that I want to become and you pick the path that manifests a core part of your ideal self. The third dimension is uncertain experiential value. The uncertainty from not knowing what you're getting yourself into can feel kind of crippling or paralyzing but it doesn't have to be that way. The first technique here is called the select crowd which involves basing your choice on the aggregated opinions or experiences of a small crowd, a small group of experts who have experience in what you're potentially deciding to do. This is best to use when you want to guess how an experience might feel by checking in with a small hand-picked group of people who've been there and done that and also ideally know you well. This helps to navigate any uncertainty about how an experience will actually feel because it's basically like getting a movie review almost from people who have similar tastes to yours and whose opinions that you trust. The second strategy is called trust the expert and this is where you look for a professional expert opinion. This is best to use for decisions that require specialized knowledge so medical, legal, financial that you simply don't have. This shifts a lot of the heavy thinking and the psychological burden away from you to a trusted expert who has done this before and you know that they're professional, you know that they can sort you out basically. The fourth dimension is irreversibility because you could just yolo your way through life if you wanted to but some of them might be irreversible and so that could also cause you problems down the line. The first strategy here is testing the waters. This approach involves sampling and life change through a small controlled or like reversible step or experiment to see how it feels before you fully commit. An example from my own life is dabbling in creating YouTube videos while I was still studying medicine and then working as a doctor. I was running these little experiments of like oh what does it feel like to actually create content and post online and so I ended up running these identities in parallel before committing to making any switch. This turns what could be an irreversible one-shot decision into a series of smaller manageable choices and experiments. The fifth dimension is risk because let's be real there is some risk in making some life decisions but once you learn these two strategies you'll hopefully never have to risk it all again. The first strategy here is the status quo. This is basically the decision to stick with your current known situation based on your cumulative past experience. It's basically choosing to stay with what you know rather than what you don't know and I find this is a particularly useful one when you're already stretched or already in a period of life where there's a lot of moving parts. It's useful to actually have some things you're like okay this is actually a pretty solid choice we're going to stick with this and have certainty in what we already know to be good in this area of our life. The second technique here is called hedge clipping and this is actually an action first strategy for unpredictable environments where you just need to take the first acceptable step towards safety towards where you want to go and adjust your next move as you go along. This technique helps to break what is an impossible problem with a lot of uncertainty into lots of tiny immediate goals and steps that you can take and so once one step is done you look around see what's changed and then you take the next good enough step. The final key step in making transformative life decisions is actually all about self-trust. It's not about the strategies but it's instead about believing in yourself and believing that you have the wisdom that you need to make your decision with incomplete information and trusting yourself to be able to handle and thrive in whatever happens next. So at the end of the day all of these decision tools help you to navigate the branches of the fig tree but self-trust is what makes you reach for one fig and actually start living. And so I'd like you to think of one transformative life decision that you've maybe been mulling over whether that's a move, a career change, a relationship or leap that you keep putting off and then just pick one or two of the strategies from this video that felt the most resonant for that decision and so write it down somewhere that you'll actually see it and let yourself take that first step. If you enjoyed this video I think you might like this video over here about making the most of your life by actually finishing what you start and feel free to hit the subscribe button if you'd like to see more videos like this. Thanks so much for watching, take care of yourself and remember that the journey is the destination. I'll see you in the next video. Bye!