The Zen of Decision-Making

Thinking about: Decision-making

As we have seen, it is tempting to classify our decisions as being either good or bad, but we must resist this temptation. We should instead classify them according to whether they were prudent to have made and whether they turned out to be beneficial. Decisions can be prudent without subsequently being beneficial, and they can be beneficial without having been prudent.

A decision is prudent if you perform due diligence in making it—if, that is, you reason rather than feel your way to it. You can therefore know immediately after making a decision whether it was prudent. In contrast, a decision is beneficial if it has a desirable outcome, which is something you can’t know until after making the decision in question.

When assessing our decisions, however, another factor comes into play. I have talked about decisions having good or bad outcomes, as if the outcome of a decision were a fixed thing, the way the outcome of, say, a basketball game is. The Knicks won? Then that is the final outcome, and if you are a Knicks fan, it is a beneficial outcome.

Think about your life, however, and you will realize that the outcome of a decision isn’t fixed in the manner just described. At one point in time, a decision can have what looks like a bad outcome, but a bit later, you might revise your assessment, and later still, you might revise your revision. This point can best be made by telling you the story of the Chinese farmer’s runaway horse:

On hearing about the horse, his neighbors came to console him: “That’s too bad,” they said. The farmer’s reply: “Maybe.”

The horse soon returned, accompanied by seven wild horses. “That’s great!” his neighbors exclaimed. The farmer’s reply: “Maybe.”

The following day, his son tried to ride one of the wild horses to tame it but was thrown and broke his leg. “That’s too bad,” his neighbors told him. “Maybe,” said the farmer.

The day after that, military officers came to the village looking for conscripts, but because the son’s leg was broken, they rejected him. “Isn’t that wonderful!” his neighbors exclaimed. You can doubtless guess the farmer’s reply.*

So, was a decision you made yesterday—or last month or last year—beneficial? Maybe, but you might subsequently revise this assessment.

One of the difficulties we face in making decisions is that our values will likely change with the passage of time. This puts us in the awkward position of making decisions today that will affect our future selves—individuals who might not share our values. The story of the runaway horse reveals another difficulty. Even if our values stay the same, changes in our circumstances can have an impact on whether the outcome of a decision counts as beneficial or adverse.

A Thinker will respond to this situation by reminding us that we shouldn’t judge our decisions by their outcomes. We should instead judge them by the process used to make them. As long as we made what I have characterized as a prudent decision, we will know that we did our best in making it, and if subsequent events transform what looked like a good decision into what looks like a bad decision, we can shrug it off as bad luck—and maybe hope that our luck will change for the better.

---

*This story can be found in my How to Think More and Better: Being Reasonable in Unreasonable Times. The source of the story is unclear. My account is based on Alan Watts’s telling of it: Alan Watts, “The Runaway Horse,” Official Alan Watts Org, April 20, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch/QmYG0LIznkk.

Need more food for thought? Click here for my past essays, listed by title.