WEBVTT

1
00:00:00.151 --> 00:00:09.077
a lot of the fear that we have around choosing, a lot of the anxiety that we have that comes with freedom, a lot of it's very irrational.

2
00:00:09.557 --> 00:00:13.760
Before the choice, there's all these fears of like, well, what if I choose the wrong one?

3
00:00:13.820 --> 00:00:14.781
What if I make a mistake?

4
00:00:14.801 --> 00:00:17.723
What if I regret not going down this other path?

5
00:00:18.563 --> 00:00:21.445
Whereas what we find is that after you have chosen that you have chosen,

6
00:00:22.785 --> 00:00:24.246
your feelings are quite different.

7
00:00:24.566 --> 00:00:27.567
They are similarly irrational, but in a different direction.

8
00:00:28.327 --> 00:00:37.070
And so in this chapter, it's probably useful to start out by going through what is the psychological process of choosing and committing?

9
00:00:37.590 --> 00:00:38.931
What does that feel like?

10
00:00:39.511 --> 00:00:41.792
How does that actually function within your mind?

11
00:00:41.992 --> 00:00:47.274
And how do you end up coming to see it down the road after the fact?

12
00:00:47.614 --> 00:01:00.962
Now, as soon as we started working on this episode and on this chapter, my mind immediately went to a researcher that I'm a huge fan of, who I think his work is very relevant and appropriate here.

13
00:01:01.022 --> 00:01:07.645
And that's Dan Gilbert, who is one of the preeminent happiness researchers, positive psychologists out of Harvard.

14
00:01:07.986 --> 00:01:11.888
And Gilbert is a super interesting guy because I think in a lot of ways he's,

15
00:01:13.328 --> 00:01:20.424
His life story kind of illustrates a lot of the points he makes about commitment and choice and choosing.

16
00:01:21.412 --> 00:01:25.514
So quick bio, Dan Gilbert, he dropped out of high school at 15.

17
00:01:25.754 --> 00:01:26.955
He grew up near Chicago.

18
00:01:26.975 --> 00:01:32.117
It sounds like he was a bit of a hippie, a bit of a free spirit, a bit of an estate, if you will.

19
00:01:32.498 --> 00:01:34.318
He started hitchhiking around the country.

20
00:01:34.398 --> 00:01:36.539
He was reading a lot of Eastern philosophy.

21
00:01:36.560 --> 00:01:37.780
He was meditating.

22
00:01:37.820 --> 00:01:39.441
He was into all sorts of woo-woo stuff.

23
00:01:40.161 --> 00:01:43.163
And he initially wanted to become a creative writer.

24
00:01:43.183 --> 00:01:43.643
Yeah.

25
00:01:43.683 --> 00:01:50.127
So he settled around Denver with his girlfriend and his son, and he started writing science fiction on a typewriter.

26
00:01:50.407 --> 00:01:52.388
Now, at the time, he wanted to support his young family.

27
00:01:52.428 --> 00:01:56.010
So he went back to school and then he started going to community college.

28
00:01:56.670 --> 00:02:04.195
And when he arrived at the community college and wanted to sign up for creative writing courses, they were all full for that semester.

29
00:02:04.255 --> 00:02:11.999
And so he looked at the course listing and he asked himself, what class will help me write science fiction better than anything else?

30
00:02:13.740 --> 00:02:14.360
psychology.

31
00:02:14.720 --> 00:02:15.360
That makes sense.

32
00:02:15.440 --> 00:02:19.141
Like if I want to be a better writer, I should probably understand a little bit about human psychology.

33
00:02:19.621 --> 00:02:20.981
So he took the psychology course.

34
00:02:21.281 --> 00:02:22.442
He loved it so much.

35
00:02:23.182 --> 00:02:24.822
He just went all in on it.

36
00:02:25.242 --> 00:02:26.442
You could say he committed to it.

37
00:02:26.723 --> 00:02:31.203
Within a year, he had stopped writing fiction entirely and he was enrolled full-time at UC Denver.

38
00:02:31.403 --> 00:02:33.664
Within 10 years, he had a PhD from Princeton.

39
00:02:33.724 --> 00:02:37.445
And within 20 years, he was a tenured professor at Harvard doing some of the

40
00:02:39.805 --> 00:02:41.607
that people like you and I talk about today.

41
00:02:41.627 --> 00:02:44.109
Did you know any, I didn't know any of this story beforehand.

42
00:02:44.229 --> 00:02:49.053
He's written, you know, Stumbling on Happiness, his biggest book probably, and lots of other books.

43
00:02:49.113 --> 00:02:50.434
And I've read all of his research.

44
00:02:50.554 --> 00:02:52.556
I had no idea about this whole background of his.

45
00:02:52.856 --> 00:02:57.540
Well, it's funny, actually, I do know one story about him, which is why I thought of him for this chapter.

46
00:02:57.600 --> 00:02:59.061
And we'll get to that story in a second.

47
00:02:59.101 --> 00:03:04.386
But yeah, I didn't know that he kind of came from this bohemian aesthetic life.

48
00:03:04.606 --> 00:03:05.167
And then like,

49
00:03:05.767 --> 00:03:07.809
Found psychology, went all in on it.

50
00:03:08.029 --> 00:03:11.873
I mean, it's actually, it's a beautiful representation of kind of what this whole episode is about.

51
00:03:11.913 --> 00:03:15.576
Like he found a thing that resonated, decided, right?

52
00:03:15.656 --> 00:03:21.602
He cut off the alternatives, went all in on it, and it paid off in a massive way.

53
00:03:21.822 --> 00:03:27.307
He's got this great quote, by the way, where he said, make a plan for your life and then be grateful when it doesn't go that way.

54
00:03:27.327 --> 00:03:27.948
Yeah.

55
00:03:28.224 --> 00:03:29.445
He's full of those, yeah.

56
00:03:29.586 --> 00:03:30.046
I love him.

57
00:03:30.366 --> 00:03:37.294
So Gilbert is really famous for having a lot of kind of counterintuitive happiness research.

58
00:03:37.354 --> 00:03:43.120
He has all sorts of findings that show that a lot of what we expect to make us happy doesn't make us happy.

59
00:03:43.140 --> 00:03:43.641
And a lot of the

60
00:03:43.961 --> 00:03:48.345
Stuff that we expect to make us unhappy doesn't really make us unhappy and vice versa.

61
00:03:48.545 --> 00:03:53.269
In a lot of cases, the things that we remember as making us happy actually didn't make us that happy at the time.

62
00:03:53.329 --> 00:03:57.292
And that basically our perception of our own happiness is very unreliable.

63
00:03:57.452 --> 00:04:00.114
It's quite relative given the circumstances.

64
00:04:00.695 --> 00:04:04.578
Now, this is going to be really important in a minute once we kind of come back to commitment.

65
00:04:04.913 --> 00:04:11.122
His foray into this line of research actually totally happened on accident back in the early 90s.

66
00:04:11.162 --> 00:04:19.054
He was having lunch with a colleague and it just so happened that both him and that colleague had endured like pretty awful years.

67
00:04:19.094 --> 00:04:19.714
They both had.

68
00:04:20.155 --> 00:04:21.715
people close to them pass away.

69
00:04:21.735 --> 00:04:25.296
They both had some pretty significant professional setbacks.

70
00:04:25.316 --> 00:04:35.658
They had some problems in their personal lives and they were sitting there talking about it, but also kind of analyzing themselves as I guess psychologists do when they sit and have lunch for a long time.

71
00:04:35.998 --> 00:04:44.360
And they realized that both of them actually felt a lot better about their situations than they would have guessed beforehand that they were handling everything that

72
00:04:45.260 --> 00:04:46.781
much better than they would have predicted.

73
00:04:47.081 --> 00:04:54.246
And that looking back, things were actually not as awful as they sounded initially.

74
00:04:54.566 --> 00:05:02.912
So this got them curious of like, why don't we try to measure people's forecasting into what's going to make them happy and what actually makes them happy?

75
00:05:03.152 --> 00:05:12.935
And this kicked off a series of fascinating findings that Gilbert later kind of packaged together and labeled the psychological immune system.

76
00:05:13.315 --> 00:05:21.757
And the idea behind the psychological immune system is that the same way our body will fight off bacteria and a cold virus or...

77
00:05:22.197 --> 00:05:30.507
Our psychology also seems to have a bit of an immune system to keep unhappiness and misery at bay.

78
00:05:30.687 --> 00:05:39.537
So it turns out that we will misremember things in our favor, that we will highlight things in our past that make us happier and happier.

79
00:05:40.458 --> 00:05:45.280
subtly kind of forget the things that were unexciting or uninteresting.

80
00:05:45.720 --> 00:05:50.703
We will overestimate things in our future to generate a large sense of optimism and hope.

81
00:05:50.903 --> 00:05:58.246
Whereas like once we actually get the thing that we're excited about, it's never as good as you think it's going to be.

82
00:05:58.286 --> 00:06:03.689
And so he identified all of these different ways that our mind is kind of

83
00:06:04.909 --> 00:06:10.233
irrational and inaccurate in terms of what it predicts and what it expects.

84
00:06:10.493 --> 00:06:18.539
And it seems to consistently be irrational and inaccurate in the same direction, which is to make us mildly happier.

85
00:06:18.959 --> 00:06:21.541
Our psychological immune system takes many different forms.

86
00:06:21.681 --> 00:06:30.527
It comes in rationalizing, post hoc justifications, reframing situations, finding silver linings to terrible things that

87
00:06:31.408 --> 00:06:36.330
It also involves a series of cognitive biases that we are just like not even aware of when they're happening.

88
00:06:36.630 --> 00:06:41.071
So my favorite story involving Dan Gilbert is actually about one of those biases.

89
00:06:41.111 --> 00:06:43.512
He had been with his girlfriend for like 15 years or something.

90
00:06:43.552 --> 00:06:44.573
They'd never gotten married.

91
00:06:44.653 --> 00:06:47.994
And he was talking to a colleague about some of his recent research.

92
00:06:48.074 --> 00:06:50.855
And he actually found that putting constraints

93
00:06:51.895 --> 00:06:57.980
on somebody made them more satisfied with their situation than removing the constraints, right?

94
00:06:58.000 --> 00:07:00.943
It's, it's kind of Sartre and the prisoner of war camp.

95
00:07:01.003 --> 00:07:09.349
It's like he found the more constraints you put on people, the more satisfied they seem to be with that situation.

96
00:07:09.610 --> 00:07:12.532
After the fact, his colleagues said, oh, that's really interesting.

97
00:07:12.592 --> 00:07:15.855
That's like a very strong psychological argument for marriage.

98
00:07:16.796 --> 00:07:18.458
And Dan Gilbert sat there for a second.

99
00:07:18.498 --> 00:07:22.022
And up until that point, he had never really believed in the value of marriage.

100
00:07:22.062 --> 00:07:24.444
He saw it as kind of a pointless legal formality.

101
00:07:24.825 --> 00:07:26.987
And he sat there and he was like, oh, shit.

102
00:07:27.559 --> 00:07:29.640
And he went home and immediately proposed to his girlfriend.

103
00:07:30.260 --> 00:07:34.202
And sure enough, he later said, getting married made me happier with my relationship.

104
00:07:34.482 --> 00:07:39.023
It's that barrier to exit that makes you more satisfied staying where you are.

105
00:07:39.404 --> 00:07:52.949
Now, this is important for commitments because it turns out that there are a lot of aspects of our psychological immune system that are kind of geared towards nudging us to be satisfied with our decisions, even if it wasn't the greatest decision in the world.

106
00:07:53.529 --> 00:07:53.729
Right.

107
00:07:53.769 --> 00:07:59.054
So the fear that the estate has, which is like, I can't make a choice.

108
00:07:59.975 --> 00:08:01.256
What if I make the wrong choice?

109
00:08:01.376 --> 00:08:02.437
What if I'm not happy?

110
00:08:02.497 --> 00:08:04.498
What if this other choice was the better choice?

111
00:08:04.578 --> 00:08:06.820
The dizziness of freedom, the dizziness of freedom.

112
00:08:07.861 --> 00:08:08.562
It turns out.

113
00:08:09.660 --> 00:08:17.703
Once you've made the choice, your mind will unconsciously start justifying that choice to yourself and finding reasons to be happy about it.

114
00:08:17.983 --> 00:08:22.365
And I think this is actually an important part of our psychological software.

115
00:08:22.705 --> 00:08:24.526
Evolutionarily speaking, evolutionarily,

116
00:08:24.902 --> 00:08:28.763
Optionality was very scarce throughout most of human history.

117
00:08:28.783 --> 00:08:32.284
And so we have a very strong bias towards maintaining optionality.

118
00:08:32.985 --> 00:08:44.388
But then it makes sense once you have kind of walked through that door and closed the other doors, it makes sense that you would have a bias towards justifying that decision and being happy with whatever resulted from it.

119
00:08:45.169 --> 00:08:53.455
opposite, opposite biases, depending on when, like that you were talking about that anxiety before the decision versus the different anxiety you might have after it.

120
00:08:53.475 --> 00:08:54.936
They're completely different mechanisms.

121
00:08:55.016 --> 00:08:55.737
It seems like, yeah.

122
00:08:55.917 --> 00:08:58.279
And I come back to the cold pool metaphor, right?

123
00:08:58.339 --> 00:08:58.659
It's like,

124
00:08:59.640 --> 00:09:05.085
The fear of jumping in is only matched by the satisfaction once you're already in.

125
00:09:05.606 --> 00:09:09.850
Like, nobody ever jumps into a cold pool on a hot summer day and is like, why did I do this?

126
00:09:10.250 --> 00:09:11.231
I made the wrong decision.

127
00:09:11.271 --> 00:09:13.513
I should have jumped into the hot tub instead.

128
00:09:13.533 --> 00:09:16.155
Like, it's, no, you're like, this is nice.

129
00:09:16.576 --> 00:09:18.177
The cold pool example, you can't.

130
00:09:19.118 --> 00:09:22.879
jump out of the cold pool as if you've never done it before, right?

131
00:09:23.299 --> 00:09:29.201
Whereas that door study I was talking about where you get the three doors, always keeping those three options open, there's a difference there.

132
00:09:29.221 --> 00:09:30.621
There's a qualitative difference there too.

133
00:09:30.781 --> 00:09:34.182
Categorical difference there actually, the reversible versus unreversible.

134
00:09:34.322 --> 00:09:43.004
And that's actually something they see in the research is that the psychological immune system actually kicks in the strongest when you have an irreversible decision.

135
00:09:43.064 --> 00:09:44.765
So you make a decision and you can't go back on it.

136
00:09:45.245 --> 00:09:49.971
you're probably going to be more satisfied with it just because you have no other option in that case.

137
00:09:50.292 --> 00:09:55.779
So kind of in the short term, if you're making these decisions, you have these irreversible decisions that you need to make.

138
00:09:56.099 --> 00:09:59.003
There is a little bit of an argument for like, just make the decision.

139
00:09:59.483 --> 00:10:00.224
Just do it.

140
00:10:00.705 --> 00:10:02.167
And your brain will kind of follow you there.

141
00:10:02.427 --> 00:10:08.932
I think in the modern world where there is, it's more like the open door study, or it's more like the door study where you can keep all of these doors open if you want to.

142
00:10:08.952 --> 00:10:12.055
There might be a better door down the hall almost at all times.

143
00:10:12.615 --> 00:10:14.316
I think that's where a lot of us get stuck.

144
00:10:14.456 --> 00:10:16.758
We have the optionality to keep all those doors open.

145
00:10:17.058 --> 00:10:17.219
Yeah.

146
00:10:17.319 --> 00:10:23.003
But the psychological immune system works best when there are these kind of like irreversible decisions, or at least ones that we perceive as irreversible.

147
00:10:23.163 --> 00:10:29.428
This lends itself to Dan Gilbert's point that like increasing constraints are

148
00:10:29.737 --> 00:10:33.059
on your decision actually increases your satisfaction with that decision.

149
00:10:33.119 --> 00:10:39.664
Like the more irreversible you can make something, the more satisfied with it you'll probably be.

150
00:10:40.124 --> 00:10:43.626
It's funny, actually, I just saw this yesterday on social media.

151
00:10:43.847 --> 00:10:47.009
It was an interview with the sports journalist Stephen A. Smith.

152
00:10:47.189 --> 00:10:52.773
He was like, I have a friend whose prenup, I believe, is the most perfect legal document ever written.

153
00:10:53.153 --> 00:10:55.194
It's a prenup of only one sentence.

154
00:10:56.384 --> 00:10:57.724
You want to guess what the one sentence is?

155
00:10:57.964 --> 00:10:59.765
Whoever leaves gets nothing.

156
00:11:02.566 --> 00:11:04.666
How's that for incentives and irreversibility?

157
00:11:05.507 --> 00:11:06.187
Yeah.

158
00:11:06.287 --> 00:11:09.688
There's been decisions that I've made where it was just like, oh, I got all these options in front of me.

159
00:11:09.928 --> 00:11:12.909
And I felt that dizziness of freedom before.

160
00:11:13.289 --> 00:11:16.490
And as soon as I made one, I just instantly almost felt better about it.

161
00:11:16.670 --> 00:11:20.551
When I finished my master's degree, I was like still like, I don't know what I want to do with my life type of thing.

162
00:11:20.611 --> 00:11:21.231
And I said, screw it.

163
00:11:21.251 --> 00:11:22.952
I'm going to go live in South America for a little while.

164
00:11:23.592 --> 00:11:25.654
And I was so anxious before that.

165
00:11:25.674 --> 00:11:27.516
And I was like, I don't know what I want to do, blah, blah, blah.

166
00:11:27.536 --> 00:11:30.218
And as soon as I made that decision, I was like, there's there was clarity.

167
00:11:30.238 --> 00:11:31.379
I knew exactly what I needed to do.

168
00:11:31.439 --> 00:11:32.320
I need to buy this ticket.

169
00:11:32.340 --> 00:11:34.142
I need to sell all my stuff.

170
00:11:34.202 --> 00:11:36.524
I needed all of these things like just fell into place.

171
00:11:36.544 --> 00:11:40.248
I think that's part of it, too, is it gives you this clarity again, almost no matter what it was.

172
00:11:40.848 --> 00:11:43.710
That honestly probably wasn't a great decision of mine to do.

173
00:11:43.750 --> 00:11:48.012
I probably should have just kept going on a more stable career path at the time.

174
00:11:48.672 --> 00:11:55.436
But that said, I made the decision, and it removed a lot of that uncertainty around it.

175
00:11:55.856 --> 00:11:57.016
You're alluding to something.

176
00:11:57.036 --> 00:12:04.360
This is actually a point I made in Subtle Art, and it's something that I believe very strongly, but it's very hard to communicate.

177
00:12:04.620 --> 00:12:05.421
I think people who are

178
00:12:06.221 --> 00:12:08.404
very aesthetic in the way they live.

179
00:12:08.424 --> 00:12:10.026
They don't understand.

180
00:12:10.407 --> 00:12:14.892
What you just described is a very subtle form of freedom in that

181
00:12:15.872 --> 00:12:22.573
When you cut off the alternatives, it actually frees you to focus on the thing that you chose on, right?

182
00:12:23.113 --> 00:12:26.174
And that's actually a very powerful form of freedom.

183
00:12:26.454 --> 00:12:26.934
Hey, everybody.

184
00:12:27.294 --> 00:12:28.415
Hope you enjoyed this video.

185
00:12:28.515 --> 00:12:31.815
It was just one clip from a much larger, more thorough episode.

186
00:12:32.035 --> 00:12:35.296
If you want to watch or listen to the full episode, click on the link in the description.

187
00:12:35.436 --> 00:12:44.478
And if you want to work on the topic at your own pace, we have a free PDF guide with all the resources, citations, and exercises at solvepodcast.com slash commitment.

188
00:12:45.182 --> 00:12:45.997
See you in the next one.