Why do smart people struggle to make difficult decisions?

I was recently helping a friend struggling with a tough decision: He was in a stable, but stagnant job and had an exciting offer from a less prestigious, but fast growing company. As the deadline to make a decision grew nigh, he had paralyzed himself in indecision, his risk-reward matrix resembling a maze he was lost in rather than a path to a satisfactory answer.

A while ago, I was in a meeting where a highly-respected VP had to make a “go/no go” call on a critical privacy/security question. After hearing everyone’s opinions and looking at all the data, rather than make a call, she ended the meeting with platitudes like, “Let’s continue the conversation,” and “I’ll defer to our self-organizing bottom-up values.”

Watching otherwise brilliant individuals struggle with decision making made me wonder: why do we find it so difficult to make tough calls?

Some explanations are easy: human beings are lazy, and prefer safety and continuity. They want to change what they dislike and keep what they like in the status quo all at once.

Plus, making a choice closes the door, at least for now, on all other options and all their hypothetical positives. This makes you feel poorer, and the apprehension of this moment makes you defer the decision.

There is also the fear of the long-term unknown. When you make a decision, you’re not just choosing a specific outcome for now. You’re choosing a timeline, whereby the costs and benefits flow downstream, like a river, for a very long while. And there is no simple math that gives you an obvious, ironclad, definitive answer. (Attribution)

However, there is more to this than meets the eye. This phenomena impairs us individually as well as collectively.

The economist Robert Samuelson posits that as a country, we solve our problems and make choices either by consensus or by crisis. We debate difficult issues until we reach agreements that, while not fully satisfying, enjoy grudging majority support. If consensus fails, we wait until an unannounced crisis forces us to do what we don’t want to do.

He further suggests that making hard choices is hard since there are no perfect solutions, just several imperfect ones.

Democracies, in his telling, are creatures of the present because the public focuses on the here and now, not some future hypothetical problem. That makes it hard to inflict present pain for uncertain future gain.

When political or business leaders do this, we call them flip-floppers or wafflers; when we do it, we call ourselves thoughtful and deliberate. In both cases, it is human nature at work.

There is an even deeper dynamic at work.

We are all procrastinators.

The New York Times recently wrote in detail about how we procrastinate on making hard calls and rationalize our behavior.

According to the Times article,  “procrastination” is derived from the Latin verb procrastinare - to put off until tomorrow. But, procrastination is also derived from the ancient Greek word akrasia - doing something against our better judgment.

A specific example: rather than grappling with a difficult task or choice, you may end up doing something less pressing, like organizing your clothes. The less difficult task is often more time consuming, and takes your mind off the fact that you are delaying something far more important.

So, you’re not only aware that you’re avoiding the task in question, but that doing so is probably a bad idea.

And yet, so many of us do exactly this.

This is the case because the more important task or choice is difficult, we dread dealing with it, feel guilty about it, and focus our energies on assuaging that guilt and deriving some short-term relief (by say, organizing our clothes) and hope that the harder choice gets dealt with in some other way and/or by some other person.

In that sense, procrastination isn’t a character flaw, but a way to cope with challenging emotions and negative moods induced by certain critical tasks - boredom, anxiety, insecurity, frustration, resentment, self-doubt, etc.

But still, what explains the dread and fear of an important choice? Surely, our past achievements should leave us more confident to make tough calls, no?

This is where a combination of low self-esteem, imposter syndrome and self-doubt all collaborate to make us comatose. And those feelings will resurface when we return to this difficult task after organizing our clothes or finishing whatever diversion we had chosen to distract us. Only, this time, those negative feelings will be more intense and amplified by the guilt of having procrastinated.

In such a situation, we’re even less able to make thoughtful, future-oriented decisions. When faced with a task that makes us feel anxious or insecure, the amygdala — the “threat detector” part of the brain — perceives that task as a genuine threat, in this case to our self-esteem or well-being.

So, yet again, in the face of evidence and awareness, we procrastinate.

Additionally, as psychologist Dr. Hal Hershfield, a professor of marketing at the U.C.L.A. Anderson School of Management states, on a neural level, we perceive our “future selves” more like strangers than as parts of ourselves. When we procrastinate, parts of our brains actually think that the tasks we’re putting off — and the accompanying negative feelings that await us on the other side — are somebody else’s problem.

Finally, we fall back on procrastinating again and again since humans repeat behavior that is rewarded. And the short-term distraction briefly rewards us by making us feel less guilty. We reap the reward in the present while believing that the painful consequences will be borne by someone else, a future version of us.

Which brings me back to the point Robert Samuelson brought up earlier about how democracies avoid present pain even if it promises future gain.  

In early 2008, there was a high level of awareness that there was something wrong with the housing market and the U.S. economy as a whole. Instead of looking at the big banks and their risky lending practices, the U.S. government, with an election coming up, cut taxpayers a check for $300 or $600 to juice consumer spending and boost the GDP.

Instead of losing weight, the government bought more donuts with borrowed money and reorganized its clothes to find ones that still fit. And we all know what happened later that year.

So, if you find it hard to make tough choices, don’t feel guilty.

But also know that there is no way around it. Not making a decision by delaying it is also a decision. Time does not stop, and neither will the footsteps of the moment of reckoning.