Sometimes we face tough decisions that involve one or more unknowns.  We can’t know in advance what the consequences of each alternative will be.  This is especially true of big decisions like quitting a job, entering or exiting a relationship, or moving to a new city.

When faced with such a decision, what do you do?  If you can’t figure out the consequences, can you do any better than guessing?

Usually what people do in such situations is freeze.  Even when you don’t like what you have, you may worry that the alternatives are worse.  In a way every decision involves a choice between maintaining the status quo vs. making a change.  When we can’t be certain a change will work out for the better, by default we stay put.

Let me give you a very simple method of making these kinds of decisions.  In most cases it takes no more than 60 seconds to evaluate any particular path.

For each alternative you’re considering, ask yourself, “Is this really me?”

What you’re asking is whether each path is a fair expression of who you truly are.  To what degree does each option reflect the real you?

Decisions are acts of self-expression

When we look at choices as being more than just paths — as being creative statements of self-expression — certain decisions become much easier to make.  You may say to yourself, “This path isn’t going to be easy, but I know this is the right way to go because it’s who I am.”  Or you may conclude, “No matter how I try to represent this to myself, I know that deep down this isn’t who I am.  This just isn’t me.”

It’s very important to separate this evaluation step from the act of summoning the courage to act on this knowledge.  It’s OK to acknowledge you’re in a place you don’t want to be, even when you lack the ability to do anything about it right now.  The courage to act comes later.

Here are some ways you can apply this method:

• Is this job really me?
• Is this company really me?
• Is being an employee (or enterpreneur or investor or business owner) really me?
• Is this relationship really me?
• Is this city really me?
• Is this house really me?
• Is this book I’m reading really me?
• Is this shirt/dress/tie really me?
• Is this friend really me?
• Is this hobby really me?
• Is this car really me?
• Is this food really me?
• Is this habit really me?
• Is this spiritual or religious belief really me?
• Is this level of fitness really me?

Notice that you can apply “Is this really me?” to decisions both big and small.  This is something you can use every day, even when you’re just deciding what groceries to buy.

Say a few syllables

If you have trouble deciding if a decision is really you, just describe its attributes out loud.  In the words of the Three Stooges, “Say a few syllables.”

For example, when you’re thinking about changing careers, describe the new career you’re considering.  Is it safe or risky?  Bland or exciting?  Social or solitary?

Now consider whether those same adjectives could describe you as a person?  Are you safe or risky?  Bland or exciting?  Social or solitary?  Is this career really you?

Sometimes this can get a bit silly, but I’m certain you’ll gain some interesting insights if you just humor me and do it.

If you’re feeling bold, do the same for your your closest relationships.  It will teach you a great deal about which people are the best fits for you.  If your current relationship feels a bit off, this process will show you why.  You’ll be able to see where your true self and your current reality are misaligned.

A personal example – shopping for a desk

Three weeks ago Erin and I moved to a new house, and I wanted to get a new desk for my office.  (My old desk was 14 years old and so worn down that charities didn’t even want it.  I opted to use it for martial arts practice until it was a pile of sawdust.)  This time I wanted a high-quality desk that would last me a long time instead of the particle board special I bought for $99 after college.

I made a detailed list of criteria for what I wanted, took measurements of the available space, and gave myself an unlimited budget.  I browsed through many local furniture stores and searched through office furniture web sites, but nothing really grabbed me.  I started thinking maybe I should have a custom desk built, but that seemed like overkill.  I started to get a bit frustrated, and my new home office remained deskless for several days.  I thought to myself, “This should be an easy problem to solve, especially with no fixed budget.  I must be making this harder than necessary somehow.”

Eventually I stepped back and asked myself if there was a better way to find the right desk.  I didn’t want to settle for something I didn’t like, but I realized that instead of trying to find something that met my far-too-anal list of criteria, what I really wanted was a desk that would suit me, something that would reflect the kind of person I am.

So I decided to make the decision by looking at each candidate desk and asking myself, ”Is this really me?”  I went back to the same local stores, and it was an amazingly different experience.  Instead of looking for what I wanted, I looked for who I was.  I looked around for something that was me in the form of a desk.

Yeah, I know that sounds weird.  In fact, I actually wanted to find a desk that was a bit weird.  If it wasn’t a little weird, it wouldn’t be me.  When I saw a desk that I thought anyone would appreciate, I knew it wasn’t for me.

Normally I hate shopping, but I actually enjoyed the experience this time.  I’d probably enjoy shopping a lot more if I always did it this way.  I’d look at a very ornate and classy desk, and I’d say, ”That’s not it.  I’m not an ornate and frilly person.”  I’d see a heavy, solid desk that only Superman could lift and say, “That one is too heavy.  I’m lighter than that.”  I’d see the cheap particle board furniture and think, “Nope.  I’m more durable and tougher than that.”

That sounds a little like the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, doesn’t it?

Eventually I sat down at an unusual desk that caught my eye.  It was an elegant mix of glass, metal, and wood.  It felt almost familiar when I sat down, but in an alien sort of way.  I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it.  It definitely wasn’t love at first sight, but there was a compelling infatuation.  I became very curious about it.

This was a desk I’d previously bypassed because at a glance I could tell it didn’t fit my initial criteria.  This time when I asked, “Is this me?” the answer didn’t come back as an immediate yes.  I had to think about it.  I described the desk to myself.  I said, “This desk is clean, efficient, organized, transparent, flowing, intelligent, creative, and well-constructed.  Some people would love this desk, but others would find it rubs them the wrong way.  I’m not sure if I like it, but it certainly grabs my attention.  I could never be bored in a room with this thing.”

I soon realized this was the right desk for me because I was describing myself.  Having used it for a couple weeks now, I’ve grown to really love it.  It’s just so me. 

(If you’re curious to see the desk I ended up purchasing, it’s the Stockton collection from The Sharper Image, available from Office Max.  I got the matching bookcase too.  It was $600 for the 5-piece set I bought… worth every penny.  And no, that’s not an affiliate link.  That would be too weird making money from selling myself in desk form.)

So here was a decision that was important to me – I’ll use my desk a lot, so it’s worthwhile to get a good one — but I was making the decision way too complicated.  Asking, “Is this me?” cut through the complexity and allowed me to figure out my true criteria.  Every desk I considered helped me converge on the final solution.

Again, I fully realize this must sound plenty weird to someone who’s never tried it.  So don’t be someone who’s never tried it. 

Positive reinforcement

When making decisions via the “Is this me?” method, you’re using an idealized version of yourself for the comparison.  This is your best self.  It’s who you are in your dreams and goals, who you want to be.

What happens when you begin to fill your life with people, places, and objects that reasonably reflect your true self?  By osmosis you’ll begin to take on more of those qualities yourself.  Just sitting behind my new desk makes me feel more organized, efficient, and creative.  It’s a constant reminder of the kind of person I strive to be.  Even when reality falls a bit short, I keep coming back to this daily positive reinforcement.  I don’t even have to think about it.  For further thoughts on this line of thinking, see the article Environmental Reinforcement of Your Goals.

I’ve been using this “Is this me?” method a lot lately.  I recently taught it to Erin, and she’s been telling me how much she likes it too.  When we go furniture shopping, we’ll look at a piece and say, “Is this really us?”  So far we always seem to be in agreement.  It’s a great way to make sure we’re on the same page.

Look around you.  What can you say is really you?  What isn’t?  What can you do about it?

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© 2007 by Steve Pavlina. If you find these ideas helpful, please leave a donation for Steve so you can enjoy the spirit of giving too.

Too often our important-but-not-urgent tasks get put on the back burner… and never make it to the front burner.  When you get busy with urgent tasks, you may feel pressured to finish those first before you can justify doing anything less urgent.  But then when you finally catch a break, you may decide you need some downtime to rest and regenerate, so those not-urgent-and-not-important tasks fill in the time before the next outbreak of urgency.  This pattern can continue for years with the important tasks always seeming just a few days away, but somehow they never reach the action phase.

These important tasks include things like setting goals, planning your future, finding a new relationship, learning new skills, improving your diet, beginning a new exercise program, starting a home-based business, or breaking an addiction.  In the short-term they may not produce much benefit, but you can bet they’ll make a huge difference in the long run.

If you feel like you’re just spinning your wheels and not really getting anywhere in life, you’re probably getting sucked in by the urgent and delaying the important.

Pay yourself first

One solution to this problem is to “pay yourself first.”  This expression is usually applied to money, but it can also be used with time.  Recognize that if you want to make significant improvements in your life, you have to bite the bullet and carve out some time for yourself.  This may require delaying urgent tasks by a day or two.  But in most cases, what seems urgent in the moment just isn’t that important in the long run.

People can wait.  The world isn’t going to come crashing down because you didn’t reply to an email the same hour it arrived.  Your boss can wait.  Your co-workers can wait.  Your spouse can wait.  Your kids can wait.  Your bills can wait.

Yes, there may be penalties by causing everyone to wait.  You may get yelled at.  You may incur some late fees.  But virtually all of that will be forgiven.  Better to cause these minor transgressions than to satisfy everyone else while you grow increasingly resentful, forever regretting what might have been.

Schedule a personal appointment

A simple way to implement the pay yourself first mantra is to schedule an appointment with yourself, just as you’d schedule a dentist appointment.  Pick a time and a place, and mark it on your calendar.  If anyone tries to add anything on your plate during that time, just say, “Sorry, I can’t.  I have an important appointment scheduled then.  Can this wait a day or two?”

When you make an appointment with yourself, honor it.  Show up, and do what you planned to do during that time.  It’s better to reschedule someone else than it is to put your own life on hold.

Isn’t this approach selfish?  Not really.  Very often the important work we put off is precisely that which would provide the greatest benefit to others as well.  If you improve your health and relationships, for instance, everyone around you benefits.  If you create a new business or switch to a more meaningful career, you’ll create a lot more social value than if you remain stuck in a dead-end job.  Denying what’s important to you only deprives others.

The 5-year test

When considering which urgent items to delay in order to carve out time for your personal appointments, use the 5-year test.  Just ask yourself, “What difference will it make 5 years from now if I delay this urgent task?”  You’ll often find that most seemingly urgent tasks will make little or no difference at all 5 years hence, even if you were to blow them off completely.

Now apply that same 5-year test to the important tasks you’d do during your scheduled personal appointments.  What difference will those make in 5 years?  Often the result is significant, and it’s this perspective that will help you say no to the urgent in order to secure time for the important.  Those 5 years will pass no matter what you do, so it’s inevitable you’ll find yourself sitting on the back end.

When you look back from today to 5 years in the past, do you see that you’ve made massive progress in life?  If not, then why not?  Did you succumb to the urgent, or did you stay focused on the important?  What will you commit to changing over the next 5 years that you didn’t do in the last 5?

Courage

You may think you’re doing people a favor by giving them a fast turnaround on urgent items.  Please don’t kid yourself.  Deep down you know it’s just a distraction, another outlet for procrastination.  It may be socially acceptable to drown in urgent tasks, but if you want to live more consciously and enjoy a truly fulfilling life, that kind of thinking must be seen for what it is — a fear-based addiction to living far below your potential.

It can take a bit of courage to say no to genuine requests for your time in order to create enough space for the important.  With practice you’ll get used to saying no, both to your own distractions and those coming from others.  Your short-term delays may frustrate people at times — you may even frustrate yourself – but most people will forgive you.  In fact, you’ll generally find that people respect your time much more once they realize you take it seriously, and this in turn will help boost your own self-respect.

A personal example

I’m in the fortunate position of being able to carve out a lot of time for myself today, especially since I’m self-employed.  But that wasn’t always the case.

When I was in college, I took a required class in human-computer interaction (as part of my computer science degree), and one of the assignments was to design and conduct a test and then write a paper on it.  The test part was a group project, but each student had to write their own papers.  This project was worth 10% of our grade.

Due to my heavy class load, I felt like I had more assignments than I could handle.  I estimated it would take about 10 hours to research and write the paper.  I was already positioned to get an A in this class, and if I didn’t write the paper, I’d end up with an A-.  On balance I figured that going from an A- to an A in one class simply wasn’t worth 10 hours of my time, especially when I looked at it from a 5-year perspective.  In the long run, it just wasn’t going to matter.

I participated in the group portion of the project because I didn’t want my team members to suffer.  We designed and conducted a test on using a simple gestural language to input commands to a PC.  I think the test may have been inspired by the old Nintendo Power Glove (kudos to anyone who remembers it).  But after the group work was done, I refused to write the paper.  I told the professor my reasons for declining the assignment and that I accepted the consequences.  He gave me a quizzical look, but he seemed to understand.  I thought it best to tell him in advance, so he wouldn’t be left hanging waiting for me to turn it in.  By declining to write the paper, I earned a zero on the whole project, even though I contributed to the group work.  Sure enough I received an A- as my final grade in the class.

That was about 14 years ago.  Do you think to this day anyone cares that I didn’t write that paper?  The funny thing is that my refusal to do that assignment actually created more value than doing it because it gave me a good story, one that I can use to make a point.  Had I actually written that paper, I can assure you that every word would have been long forgotten by now.  But the story is actually worth something.  With 14 years of hindsight, I definitely feel I made the right choice.  I’m not seeing a lot of gestural language work on my plate these days. 

I’m sure that paper seemed important to the professor and to the other students at the time, but for me it was merely urgent.  School assignments can be valuable, but many are just busywork.  Don’t let other people’s agendas influence your own without some conscious filtering.

Making time for the important is a commitment you must make for yourself.  No one will do it for you.  The natural tendency is for your time to be flooded with to-dos from others.  Very little of it matters.  Be ever vigilant to question where your time is going and what difference your efforts are making in the long run.  It’s not always easy to do this, and it may sometimes feel like you’re swimming against the current, but with practice you’ll realize that the habit of dedicating time for the important aligns you with a more subtle current, one that flows in the direction of greater purpose, meaning, and contribution instead of just greater activity.

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© 2007 by Steve Pavlina. If you find these ideas helpful, please leave a donation for Steve so you can enjoy the spirit of giving too.

Hosts: Steve Gibson with Leo Laporte

Steve continues our discussion of authentication with a look at Internet identity metasystems.

For 16kpbs versions, transcripts, and notes (including fixes), visit Steve’s site: grc.com, also the home of the best disk maintenance and recovery utility ever written Spinrite 6.

Security Now is brought to you by Astaro Internet Security.

Bandwidth for Security Now! is provided by AOL Radio.

Running time: 49:31

In the previous article on How Your Mind Really Works, we explored the key strengths of human intelligence, such as our ability to identify invariant patterns and to recognize specific instances of them.  But these strengths don’t come without major drawbacks.  The human mind certainly has its share of weaknesses, gaps, and blind spots.

It’s wise to cultivate an awareness of our inherent mental weaknesses, since then we have a chance to compensate for them.  But if we remain blissfully ignorant of them, they’ll only come back to bite us.

Here are 10 weaknesses of human intelligence:

1. Faulty hard drive – Witness recall is notoriously inaccurate.  When asked to describe something they just saw, people frequently overlook critically important details, get existing details wrong, and add details that weren’t present at all.  It’s a bad idea to put too much faith in your memories, since they’re likely riddled with errors.  You probably don’t even remember what you’re wearing.
2. Low RAM – You can only load and process so much complexity in your mind at once.  There’s so much you don’t understand because your mind lacks the capacity to store all the subtleties needed for true comprehension.  Consequently, you’re probably making a total mess of things.
3. Slow CPU - Let’s just say you’re not the sharpest tool in the shed.
4. Infinite loops – Once a pattern of thought and behavior has become conditioned, it can be very difficult to reprogram.  This causes bad habits, addictions, and Republicans.
5. Lack of error correction – Once errors get into the system, they tend to stick around for a while.  One bad decision left uncorrected will soon see more errors piled on top of it.  This is how people sink into debt, put on weight, and get jobs, only to regret it later.  Apparently we’d rather be stupid than appear stupid.
6. Limited sensory input – Our input channels are restricted to five senses (six for some of us), which all have a limited range of capabilities.  We can’t see what’s behind a wall, we can’t touch people at a distance, and we can’t hear what people in the next building are saying… unless of course we work for the CIA.
7. Poor networking capabilities – Transferring data between two human minds is slow, tedious, and error-prone, and the protocols are beyond confusing.  It’s a safe bet that Microsoft is involved.
8. High maintenance costs – Who’d want to use hardware that takes 8 hours to reboot, suffers frequent data loss, and is routinely riddled with viruses?  OK, aside from the Dept of Homeland Security.
9. Legacy code – System instability often results from running outdated limbic legacy code.  An impressive display of human intelligence is to queue up your fight-or-flight response when asking someone out on a date.  It’s nice to be prepared just in case she tries to eat you after she rejects you.  DOS was great while it lasted, but it won’t help us save Antarctica.
10. Unreliable hardware – It’s only a matter of time before a critical component suffers an irreparable crash, and then the whole system gets dumped in a human landfill.  You’d think we’d have decent backup options by now, but at least we have the opportunity to sample hundreds of ice cream flavors before we go.  Damned #3.

I’d say we’re long overdue for an upgrade.

By the way, you cheated on #1, didn’t you?

Sorry, Antarctica.

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© 2007 by Steve Pavlina. If you find these ideas helpful, please leave a donation for Steve so you can enjoy the spirit of giving too.

Hosts: Steve Gibson with Leo Laporte

The FBI says it has uncovered one million computers that are being used by hackers without their owners’ knowledge. Today Steve talks about BotNets and the FBI’s Operation Bot Roast.

For 16kpbs versions, transcripts, and notes (including fixes), visit Steve’s site: grc.com, also the home of the best disk maintenance and recovery utility ever written Spinrite 6.

Security Now is brought to you by Astaro Internet Security.

Bandwidth for Security Now! is provided by AOL Radio.

Running time: 46:23