Would you rather be right or keep the relationship?
Do you know what szlag is in the phrase Niech cię szlag trafi? Or szwarc in Szwarc, mydło i powidło? Hardly anyone knows, because I ask people this a lot.
Truth is, you haven't actually checked the facts or the numbers, or you're relying on anecdotal evidence, meaning evidence backed by your own observations rather than documented scientific analysis. Exactly like I did a moment ago when I wrote that hardly anyone knows, because I ask a lot. Maybe it just happens that I didn't know, and neither did a few people around me.
I was 39 before I found out that calcium isn't a treatment for allergies at all. It's a myth passed down from generation to generation.
I found out when a Danish friend said to me:
Why the hell would I take calcium for an allergy?
I won't lie. It threw me completely off kilter. And what is a kilter, anyway?
Before you voice an opinion, stop for a moment and ask yourself: have you really checked the facts?
In discussions I prefer to assume there's a very good chance I'm the one who's wrong. It's better to ask one more question about why someone thinks that way, and leave it at that. As Madzia says, Would you rather be right or keep the relationship?
And that's basically the most important thing you can take away from this lesson.
Money can't buy happiness
I like to question popular sayings. My grandma used to say that money can't buy happiness, and questions immediately popped into my head:
- And does having no money make you happy?
- How do you define happiness?
- Are these two things even related?
- Did the saying come from times of terrible poverty?
- Is it an excuse these days for a lack of financial know-how?
And even if you've never thought about it, US statistics show that couples fight about money more than anything else, and ⅓ of marriages end in divorce for financial reasons.
Someone once said that if you think money can't buy happiness, maybe you just don't know where to shop.
And while deep down I get what the saying is about, that no matter how much cash you have, you can simply be unhappy, I don't think a negative attitude toward money helps with anything.
Because money does come in handy, and it can even let you “buy” some time. For example, time to do the things that make you happy. After all, all we have is time.
At the same time, I cracked up when Arnold Schwarzenegger mentioned in his biography that:
Money doesn't make you happy. I now have $50 million but I was just as happy when I had $48 million.
Best to sleep on it
When we make decisions based on emotions, gut feeling or things we merely think are true, it's worth realizing that cognitive traps and biases are lying in wait for us.
Maria Konnikova, a psychologist and poker player, talked about this in an interesting way. When going over her hands, her poker mentor Erik liked to ask:
What were you thinking at that point?
And while it's beautiful to follow your heart sometimes, to answer a question like that properly you have to go back to the thought process that should have happened before you actually made the decision.
That taught her to ask herself before every decision: What am I going to tell Erik? It forced her to analyze the facts more deeply and find a really good justification for the decisions she made.
It's worth spending more time gathering information while watching out for distortions such as:
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the recency effect, when the latest information carries more weight.
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the anchoring effect, the tendency to rely on the first piece of information as a reference point.
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confirmation bias, which means looking for information that confirms what we already believe.
The art of making good decisions is consciously balancing intuition and logic, patiently analyzing the facts, keeping your emotions in check and cutting out the influence of biases. As a rule, it comes down to this: it's best to sleep on it.