Don’t forget the importance of can’t: Life Hacks by Charles Assisi

Over the past few weeks, I’ve watched my 82-year-old father-in-law lie unmoving on a hospital bed. No one is sure in what shape he may emerge from this state. And because he can no longer speak, no one knows what he may be thinking or feeling.

It must be such a lonely feeling. Where would the mind go in such a time? Perhaps it would go to regrets.

Thinking of regrets and how to minimise them in our own lives, I was reminded of a tactic used by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. When confronted with a dilemma, he says, he imagines looking back on his decision decades later, and he asks himself what decision is least likely to leave him feeling regretful. He calls it the Regret Minimization Framework.

By way of example, he says he once grappled with the question of whether it made sense to start an online bookstore. “I knew that when I was 80, I was not going to regret not having tried this… but I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried. I knew that would haunt me every day, and so, when I thought about it that way it was an incredibly easy decision,” he said, while accepting an innovator’s award in Berlin in 2018.

Often, when I get tardy, this is the kind of question that helps me get past sloth. It also reminds me to turn the Contrast Dial on. We live in the best of times. It is easy to feel miserable about ourselves if we focus on the lives of other as depicted on their social media feeds. But that road goes nowhere. Instead, it is helpful and productive to think of how many people dream of the very life that you have.

Why is it, then, that most of us have Contrast Dial turned off? The Recency Effect explains this — we are always more likely to focus on what we are feeling or experiencing in the moment than seek out or think back to a better or nobler alternative.

Keith Rabois, managing director of Khosla Ventures, placed this in perspective on a podcast where he pointed out how 99% of the content that people consume is content that was produced over the previous 24 hours, because it sounds urgent. But is it important? Most of it, even the creators of the content would admit, is of no importance at all.

Through history, this inclination to focus on the seemingly urgent over the actually important has made its impact felt. The military historian John Gaddis argues that it was precisely this kind of misplacing of priorities that led the French general Napoleon Bonaparte to invade Russia after he had conquered most of Europe. It was widely believed Moscow would crumble, and ought to crumble, and ought to be attacked immediately. Moscow didn’t crumble.

Because, Gaddis explains, the inclination to focus on the urgent over the important had led even a great tactician like Bonaparte to miss the gap between aspiration and capability.

This Aspiration-Capability Gap is real across domains. (It doesn’t help that we’re all told, so often and untruthfully, that we can “accomplish anything we want to”.)

Napoleon’s successes in Europe led him to imagine he could achieve all his aspirations. He failed because he had reached the limits of his capabilities. This “happens to all kinds of people in all kinds of fields today who have failed to raise that simple question. What is it that we hope to do? And then what is it that we have the possibility of doing? And these are two very, very different questions,” Gaddis pointed out in a conversation last month with Shane Parrish, co-founder of the Farnam Street Blog.

I started out last week hoping to run 10 km every day for a month. Three days later, I was compelled to shave that number down by half. I admitted to myself that 10 km is what I aspire to achieve. What I am capable of achieving is possibly 5, although that number could rise if I work at it. Creating the awareness that this gap exists, and beginning to work on closing it, takes one closer to a life of fewer regrets.

I must add the caveat that the work that goes into closing this gap can be monotonous. One way to deal with that is to imagine the monotony as a tax that must be paid, if one is to get better in the long-term.