What is your choice?
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| Photo by Brendan Church on Unsplash |
What is the secret of good health?
What is the secret for achieving mastery
in your craft?
What is the secret for finding
lasting success and fulfillment?
I think the answer to all these
questions is the same. It lies in building and practicing good habits consistently
over a long period of time.
Let’s break this down a little.
I don’t think we have trouble identifying
good habits. We know what they are. Values like honesty, compassion and hard
work are taught to us from when we are little. The four key habits to good
health - eating balanced diet, drinking water, exercising and taking good rest –
are known to all of us.
We know these things. They are not
rocket science.
We seem to have some initial difficulty
with building new habits into our life, but experience has shown that this can
easily be overcome if we find the right trigger to motivate and inspire us into
action. This explains why we make New Year resolutions. The New Year conjures up a new beginning. This inspires in us a desire to shed some old skin and turn over a new leaf.
The real difficulty, however, comes in practicing what we know is good for us, consistently over the long haul. That is, putting in the required work and
waiting for the results to show.
That is tough. Not many of us can
master that kind of discipline and patience.
But why is this so difficult?
This is the question we posed in our poem last week. It’s a sobering question.
It turns out that we are deeply wired
to favour now over later.
According to the experts, making
long-term decisions and sticking with them is unnatural to us, from an evolutionary
perspective.
To quote Psychology Today, “In a
world in which life was short and governed by the unpredictability of disease,
the availability of food, and weather, there may have been little advantage in
tackling the strenuous complexities that arise from long-term planning.”
In short, we are psychically and
emotionally biased towards instant and temporal gratification.
That’s why we want success today, not
in 20 years’ time. That’s why we want to see instant results from our exploits
in the gym, not in December next year.
“But in the modern world, the
opposite is true: the biggest threats to human beings arise from the lack of
long-term thinking. Yet, as a consequence of our evolutionarily inherited
present bias, we tend to make temporally myopic decisions that influence not
only our health and finances, but also encourage us to elect officials who
promise short-term “solutions” aimed at exploiting our shortsightedness rather
than actually solving problems (emphasis mine).”
This is hard to admit, but true. I have
seen this short-term thinking in my own life, especially when I go shopping.
What to do?
“Long-term planning is a skill best
accomplished by conscious awareness
of how the disproportionate sway of short-term gratification affects our
allegedly rational decisions. Additionally long-term planning benefits from practice and foresight (emphasis mine).”
England chose to follow an unlikely and
counter-intuitive strategy in putting together their team for the 2018 World
Cup. Instead of betting on experience, the coach chose a youthful side with an
eye into the future.
Perhaps that’s why England has stood
out in this competition. They braved going against the natural bias of chasing
the trophy, hence allowing them to play passionately, without being plagued and weighed down
by the pressure that got a foothold on some of the teams in the tournament.
And look at how far the team has
come!
I’m a sucker for the idea that we too
can stand out if we can overcome our natural bias against long-term planning
and practice stick-to-itiveness.
The beginning and the in-between won't be as glamorous, instagram-mable or tweet-able moment as we would like. But the end will undoubtedly be one huge celebration.
We have a choice to make.
To paraphrase Sunny Bindra, we can make our life to be a success theatre of carefully managed scripts, props and special effects, or we can take the other road and live it with purpose and meaning.
It's a choice we all have to make.
And we all have the same opportunity to make the right choice.
What is yours?
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