Forgivable regrets. Making choices your future self won’t hate you for.
Deciding to do something or not always has a tradeoff. The opportunity cost is something we cannot avoid and have to accept. But not all decisions are equal and so no all missed opportunities are weighted the same.
Some decisions have a return door, others don’t.
We’re making decisions all the time. Every single day we’re facing several different types of decisions that range in impact.
Many of them are repetitive, low stakes and with an ability to reverse the decision if things don’t go as desired.
These types of decisions have a ‘return door’. They’re relatively non consequential in the grand scheme of things.
They have an impact within the moment but their impact into the future is hard to judge, if there is any impact at all.
Some examples of this may be like…
- Deciding to experiment with a new web browser.
- Trying out a new route to work.
- Or deciding to follow some different learning sources.
These aren’t the decisions we should spend great lengths of time worrying about.
With these type of low stakes, reversible, ‘return door' decisions we’re best to make them quickly and not get too expectant about them.
If they improve our lives, that’s great. If they don’t, no drama.
How you choose is up to you too. Go with your gut and intuition or try to apply some logic and reasoning.
With reversible decisions, don’t aim for perfection. Just choose and move forward.
The reason to not over optimize on making these types of decisions is because their relative impact is so low.
These types of decisions are not the ones that will be the big needle movers in our lives, so let’s not waste unnecessary time and energy on them.
Every decision has positive outcomes at the expense of other opportunities
With these types of decisions, if we’re not happy with the outcome we don’t have to worry too much. We can stop, change the action and reach another outcome.
The opportunity cost, (the cost of not doing other actions) with these ‘return door' decisions is negligible.
Yes there is some, but the regret factor of making these types of decisions isn’t going to keep us up at night.
(…And if they do, you’re overthinking it!)
One way door decisions can’t be reversed.
However there are also those decisions we have to make in life that have an impact far beyond the present moment.
In fact these types of decisions in some cases, almost have no visible present moment impact.
These tend to not have a return door. These are ‘one way door' decisions.
Meaning, we go in and we can’t exit and try another door. This path means we miss out on taking other paths.
The difference with ‘one way' decisions vs ‘return door' decisions is that the former leave us on a path that carries a dramatic opportunity cost while the latter as we’ve seen, has a very light opportunity cost.
This means that once a path is selected, we’re saying 'no' to several other alternate paths and outcomes.
We’re committing ourselves to a particular future outcome by walking a particular path.
Ideally this is the one that we will regret the least.
And it’s important to note that there will always be some level of regret with any decision we make, but we always must choose the path that best minimizes it.
Plus, as these types of decisions aren’t ones we can go back on, the actual regret we will potentially feel is far heavier so it goes without saying that we must choose wisely.
Less of them but more important
These decisions appear far less frequently in our lives but we must be ready to give them the full attention they deserve when it comes to processing them.
Why? Well getting these wrong can set us back not by days or weeks, but usually months and years or even decades.
Examples of one way decisions are…
- The industry we decide to commit our best working years to.
- The country, city, town we choose to live in.
- Who we choose to settle down and start a family with.
Hopefully these types of decisions we make are ones we give them most care to when making and leave us with outcomes we’re happy with in the future.
But as the opportunity cost and overall weight of regret is far heavier than those compared to 'return door' decisions we need to consider our future selves into the equation.
Aligning with our future selves and what we are most likely to want in the future is the difficult yet necessary goal of these kinds of life altering decisions.
It can be near impossible to know who we will be in five to ten years time so making a decision for that person is like taking a swing.
But to increase your probabilities of a good 'one door' decision is to take the starting point of considering your current values.
- What do you value right now?
- What are you most likely to value in the future?
- What are you unlikely to value in the future?
These questions still aren’t easy to answer I’ll admit, but they can get you thinking introspectively and raise your chances of a welcomed outcome.
In Summary, pick regrets you can live with, because there’ll always be some.
As we navigate through our lives we’ll be faced with many doors we’ll have to decide upon.
Knowing which ones are ‘one ways' and which ones are ‘return ones' is the first key to having a life with a lighter regret load.
Because whatever decision you make there will be some level of regret.
So pick the ones your future self won’t despise you for by examining your current values and questioning what your future self may or may not value in the years to come.
