Over Thinking / Under Feeling

When I started my career, I thought the right decision could always be made through logic.

If I had the right data and applied rigorous logic to the decision-making process, I would always come up with the right answer.

While this always worked for me on school exams, I realized that when it came to complex life decisions this approach wasn’t always right.

For the longest time, I perceived that decisions could be made in two ways:

1) Logical decision-making
2) Intuitive “Gut Feeling” decision-making

While I still perceive this to be the case, I’ve switched my decision-making to the following:

1) Do the logical analysis (to be well-informed)
2) Make a “Gut Feeling” decision (after seeing the hard data analysis)

Let me explain why I’ve made the shift (and why you might consider doing the same) using two different types of explanations.

When a decision only has two parameters and you’re 100% sure there are no considerations, using logic is both easy and effective.

However, many life decisions are far more complex. You’re not optimizing for one variable out of two known factors.

You’re optimizing for multiple factors, across n-dimensions of which you’re not even sure all factors are known.

In short, hyper-logical people overthink such decisions because they operate under the premise that a single, correct logical answer exists.

In many cases, it doesn’t. When you have too many known variables and an unknown number of unknown variables, there’s insufficient data to make a purely logical, fact-based decision.

In that case, I just use my (factually well-informed) intuitive decision-making process.

I’m at a point in my personal life and career where I have seen a lot. I trust my pattern recognition enough to recognize that when the facts say “yes,” but my “gut” says “no,” I decide “no.”

At first, this seems illogical, but I don’t see it that way.

In those instances, I perceive that there is some subjective factor that is not adequately captured by the quantitative data. That’s when I decide the opposite of what the data suggests.

This happens to move often in the context of making decisions regarding people. In the context of personal relationships, some people seem perfectly fine on paper but in person, something feels “off” about them to me. I often can not explain what I’m feeling, but I know I’m feeling something – and it’s not good.

Through experience, I’ve come to learn that some people have a hidden agenda. Sometimes people tell you only part of the truth. Not everyone operates with transparency. When someone tells me something that seems too good to be true, I am suspicious. These factors can have very disastrous outcomes and the factors that would allow one to avoid a bad decision.

So much about humanity does not get captured in quantitative data.

You can get a great job offer with a great firm but be assigned to a terrible boss. You can do a discounted cash flow model of your future paychecks from that job offer, but you can’t do a discounted cash flow model of how a single, terrible boss can completely erode your heart and soul over time. The first is early measurable. The latter is not.

Twenty years ago, I had to buy a new heating system for my home. Logically, I wanted the best product at the lowest price. I ended up buying the most appropriate product above the lowest price – and I knew it.

The person I bought it from was far more knowledgeable about heating and cooling than I was. He crawled underneath my house to look at the airflow ductwork. (Apparently, if you have leaky ducts, you get a better Return on Investment by spending money on sealing the ducts and insulating them compared to buying a more expensive, energy-efficient heater.) Nobody else had even bothered to tell me about that tradeoff. I bought from the person who offered me the highest degree of certainty that had the right solution for me. It was also given that I didn’t know what I didn’t know about this topic, so I trusted him much more to tell me if I was about to make a bad decision.

I see a similar trend (for the worse) when it comes to online dating apps. Before the invention of online dating, people met each other In Real Life. Those face-to-face interactions allowed both people to observe and experience hundreds of non-verbal, energetic factors about one another. Things like confidence, charm, swagger, radiance, playfulness, and a sense of humor were all relevant factors. However, none of these factors are easily captured in the tables of a SQL database. As such, online dating overemphasizes two types of data:

1) Photos and structured data that fit into a database record

2) Humanity is more complicated that that

Now, how you decide to make life decisions is entirely up to you. My point is not to say that logical decision-making is wrong (after all I built my entire career on being a logical thinker). What I am saying is that logical thinking has its limits. When you’re beyond the limits for which logical thinking is well suited, it’s better to rely on, or at least consider, other types of decision-making modalities too. Logical decision-making works best for objective data that’s easily measurable and has no subjective factors. It’s insufficient when the data is subjective and not easily measurable.

Overthinking comes from trying to apply logic to a decision that either has multiple right answers (and the overthinking brain can’t find the single “right” answer because it doesn’t exist) or the decision at hand exceeds the limits where logical decision making is useful.

Let me know your thoughts on this by commenting below.