Use this flowchart to make tough decisions easier
⏳ Not to freak you out or anything, but we’re already 6.12% of our way through 2025
Issue #252: birthright citizenship, God writes a novel, and giving yourself permission to put down the weight
By Harris Sockel
“You’re way more resilient than you think,” writes Mark Shrime, MD, PhD in one of the best stories I’ve read recently about decision making, “even when you make ‘bad’ decisions.”
We’ve touched on the art of deciding a few times in this newsletter. A quick recap:
- Every decision you make will be imperfect, so how you make decisions matters more than what you decide — you’ll learn more by committing to something and seeing how it feels than sitting in a quiet room trying to assess everything perfectly.
- Humans tend to be loss-averse: We avoid decisions because we’re afraid of giving up what we have, even if what we stand to gain could serve us better over time.
- Beware of defaults! Adherence to the status quo is itself a decision, though we’re not trained to think of it as one.
Enter: surgeon Shrime, author of Solving for Why: A Surgeon’s Journey to Discover the Transformative Power of Purpose (quite the title). In Shrime’s job as a Chair of Surgery at Ireland’s Royal College of Surgeons, I imagine at least part of the curriculum involves decision-making. A surgeon must make split-second life-or-death decisions based on a combination of training, experience, and intuition. On Medium, Shrime extends those lessons into evergreen advice for all sorts of situations. He recommends setting a series of staggered deadlines instead of just one, for example. He advises letting your anxiety point you toward what you truly care about. And, a little gift for my indecisive brain: He draws decision-making flowcharts like this:
You can view the entire chart here. It culminates in a mathematical equation weighing your choices against your values. I tried it recently and while it wasn’t easy, it forced me to write down my top three values (relevant to the decision) in one sentence each — a decision-making step many of us skip.
🌎 Worth bookmarking
- From the archive: Genealogist Andre Kearns finds two of his great-great-great grandfathers mentioned in 150-year-old newspapers, and pens a tribute to how they fought for and benefited from birthright citizenship — the right of anyone born on U.S. soil to become a citizen — after the U.S. Civil War.
- “Routine is a form of self-hypnosis… Every time we abide our routine we put a stone in the path to the place we are trying to reach.” — Laura Van Den Berg (Fight Week)
- A reminder that writing is actually harder than creating the Earth, sea, sun, and stars. (Rachel Reyes)
❤️ A dose of much-needed wisdom
“You’re not broken, and you’re not hopeless. You’ve just been carrying a load you didn’t realize you could put down.” Put down the things! It’s almost Friday. (Paddy Murphy)
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Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis
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