Making Choices

We all make choices in life. The hard thing is to live with them.

THE WORDS (2012)

From the time you get up in the morning, you begin to make choices — about what to eat for breakfast, what to wear, and on and on. A lot of these decisions are pretty trivial. But now and then, one of them is really important, and it can impact you throughout your life.

This is a book about five big decisions that you'll face. Three of these choices have a lot to do with how and with whom you spend much of your adult life. The other two help define your capabilities, so they have a profound effect on the other three. While these are not the only big decisions you'll face, we'll focus on them because they have lifetime consequences for you and because they are interconnected. As we discuss these five, you'll see that a lot of what we consider can be useful to you in making other decisions as well.

Now, this isn't a book that tells you what to choose for any of these five life decisions. Sorry. It might, at first, seem nice if someone came along and told you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, and so forth, and relieved you of having to make choices. But when you think about it, that sounds like a terrible circumstance, since how can someone else know what's right for you? Oh, they can give you some useful advice, and this book will do that too. But since you, not them and not me, live your life, experience your activities, make your friends, feel your pleasures and your pains, no one but you can make the choices that are best for you.

That's really what it means to be an adult: to have the authority to make your own choices and the responsibility to live with them. As a child, your parents, teachers, and maybe others made a lot of choices for you. But as you become an adult, you get to define (or at least influence) your own boundaries and frame the choices as you wish, and then when you've made choices, you, not anyone else, have the opportunity and the obligation to carry them out and live with them.

Choices are so common, we often don't even realize we're making them. Because many are trivial, we don't spend a lot of effort making them. And because many are routine and repetitive, we develop rules of thumb or habits that allow us to make them almost without thinking. Some decisions, however, are pivotal, a big deal, and worth a lot of time and effort.

For now, let's begin with a piece of good news: a lot of the decisions you'll have to make probably don't really matter all that much, so don't fret over them. People may have suggested that some choices are really important that are in fact not all that critical. Take, for example, the choice of which college to attend. If you've decided to go to college and have what it takes to go, just which of quite a large number of schools you select (or that select you) really doesn't make a big difference.

Some schools will be wrong for you — too hard, too easy, too big, or whatever, so you'll want to give the choice some serious attention. But so long as you're selecting from a pool of reasonably appropriate schools, the choice of what college to go to is not so important. The experiences you'll have at one or another will be different, of course, but you can't know ahead of time which will be best or most valuable or most pleasant. Whom you pal around with when you get there, which courses you end up taking, which teacher you get for one or another class, and how diligently you apply yourself to the intellectual and social experiences at your school have a lot more to do with what you get out of college than which school it is you attend. We'll come back to this in the next chapter. However, the decision about whether or not to go to college, as we'll discuss in chapter 2, is a really important decision, one that can make a big difference in your life.

Here's another piece of pretty good news: in many of the big choices in life there's not a single "right" choice with all others being "wrong." Instead, there are better choices or poorer ones, there are some pretty foolish ones or dangerous ones to be sure, and some that are especially appealing — but very seldom is there a uniquely perfect selection. Perhaps there are absolutes in the principles that guide your life and define who you are, but when it comes to selecting this or that level of schooling, job, partner, or whatever, you'll do well to explore your options, come to understand them, and to make a sensible choice by selecting one of the better ones. But don't lose sleep over finding one perfect answer.

Why can't we just avoid making choices? There's just one simple reason: scarcity. You and I have limited resources — limited money, limited time, limited talents, and limited patience. Limits all over the place! If it weren't for scarcity, you could have it all ways, and you wouldn't need to make a choice at all. But since you do face scarcity and do have to make some big choices that can have long-lasting influence, it is a good idea to figure out how best to make wise ones. That's what this book is designed to help you do.

Since choices are so varied, you shouldn't expect to find a simple formula or a single strategy that always produces a good choice; that would trivialize the challenge you face as you consider your decisions. Instead, what you can hope to do is have a framework that gives you some guidance, enables you to consider the important elements of that choice, and helps you avoid overlooking any of these really important elements. That's what we're aiming for here. We'll learn some concepts that will be a big help and explore some facts that can shed some useful light on one or another of the alternatives.

WHAT'S IN A CHOICE?

A good choice will reflect several things: it will reflect your values, your preferences, your capabilities, and your available opportunities. That's probably true about most of the choices you make, big and small. Like, what's for lunch? Your values can influence whether you will want a healthy lunch or not; your preferences play a big role in influencing whether it's a salad, some protein, or chips; and if you don't have much cash or credit, your limited capability may be a big factor in your "choice" of what to have for lunch and where to have it. And then, if there's not a shop nearby or a fridge to raid, your preferences and your cash won't matter all that much, so the available opportunities can also define your choice.

Your values influence how you behave (or they aren't really the values you live by) and what you want to achieve. There are some values that are pretty universal, like living your life with integrity and having respect and compassion for others. Different religions and various ethical principles teach values that can guide your life, but you are the boss here. You, not some philosopher or your...