You have a dilemma. It keeps you awake at night. You can’t decide which of the two options is best. You weight the pros and cons and obsess about how things might turn out if you make the wrong choice.
What you don’t realise is that your starting point is off and that you are asking yourself the wrong questions. None of it is your fault. Here’s why.
Mental shortcuts
It’s true what they say: human beings are complex creatures. Our perceptions and behaviours are determined by a multitude of factors. Anything can play a role, from our DNA to our education. Based on this premise, it wouldn’t be surprising if we all had our unique way of approaching dilemmas. And yet, experience and science show that we don’t.
As the Nobel Prize Winner, Daniel Kahneman laid out in his book, Thinking Fast and Slow, when trying to make sense of the world, we tend to take similar and predictable mental shortcuts.
Here’s a common one:
