Don't trust yourself to make the right choice

What you do every day matters more than what you do once in a while.

Gretchen Rubin

We trust ourselves too much to make the right choice instead of the easy choice.

When we choose to pursue something worthwhile, we decide in our head and rely on nothing but willpower to change our behavior.

We believe drawing an imaginary line in the sand will be enough to change who we are, but our thoughts don’t define who we are, our actions do.

Vulnerable to circumstance

Relying on willpower alone to change our behavior is a problem because we’re vulnerable to circumstance.

It’s a lot harder to eat healthy when we’re surrounded by our favorite junk food.

And yet, when we decide to pursue something worthwhile, we rarely change our environment or routine.

We keep everything exactly the same and rely on our willpower to take the difficult but worthwhile path instead of the easy but detrimental one.

For a while, we might be able to will ourselves to choose the right path and make progress, but eventually, our willpower will run out and we’ll revert back to the well-worn path of the status quo.

We’ll stay there for a while until we make a new declaration and try to white-knuckle a new round of change only to end up with the same results.

This isn’t a sustainable strategy. Willpower is a fallible system.

Better environment, better results

If we want to make sustainable change we should build our goals on top of new routines, rules, or environments.

We’re better off if we can remove our decision-making from the equation.

Instead of focusing our energy on making difficult choices, we can focus on making the right choice the easy choice by shaping our environment.

If we can shape our environment, routines, and circumstances to remove temptations and distractions, we won’t have to make any decisions.

We can just go with the flow knowing we’re making progress on what’s important.

Instead of using all of our energy swimming upriver, we should use our energy to find a river that’s flowing in the direction we’d like to travel so we can use the current to our advantage.

Make the right choice easy

We’re so eager to make change that we get started without much consideration or planning.

But it’s not what we decide that matters, it’s the actions we take every day that make a difference.

For better or for worse, what we do every day depends on what’s the easiest.

Most of us are busy most of the time. It's easy to do the right thing when we have ample time and resources, but much harder when faced with limited time and competing priorities.

Our actions define who we are, and our surroundings define our actions.

The biggest impact we can make is investing in changing our environment instead of fighting against it.

Prompts

1. Consider the most difficult pursuit in your life. What would it look like if it were easy?

2. Which area of your life do your surroundings have the biggest impact on?

3. What’s a simple change you can make to your surroundings this week to make a difficult choice easier?

Deep Dive

• Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness - Richard Thaler, Cass Sunstein
  • An investigation of how small changes in our environment, or "nudges," can lead to better decision-making.

This post is part of Prompted, a Series on IH.

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