On Decisions
Get down to the interpretive level
Every outcome you get in life is downstream of your decision-making: revenue, brand perception, relationships, satisfaction, daily aliveness.
But how much of our decision-making is actually actively and intentionally performed by our conscious self with the objective of our highest potential in mind?
Versus how much of it just happens by some default process beneath our awareness… with a much lesser or shorter term objective, such as ‘just get through the day,’ or ‘just go along to get along,’ or ‘look, just don’t die’?
Autopilot. 1
Internal heuristics that lead to generally predictable results drive much of our behaviour. Probably to preserve cognitive function in case it’s needed for more immediate or unexpected and intense challenges. This kind of thinking is behind the thousands of choices made per day on our behalf.
Every decision is first filtered through our personal automatic interpretive lens: the “point of view” your mind has constructed to ensure its own survival.
But as a result, our lives can be driven by unconscious patterns and get stuck in repetitive loops.
Example 1: Founder is Braking
A successful founder feels his business is hitting a growth ceiling. A closer look reveals that his default point of view is “I’m the only one who really gets the vision.”
He carries this POV as his layer of interpretation into every team meeting, every investor call, every product decision scanning for signs that confirm his suspicion that others don’t fully understand or appreciate the big picture.
In the short term, this underlying layer of interpretation & pattern rewards his lower/deeper self: he gets to feel special, indispensable, and intellectually ahead.
But it also holds him back: he’ll unconsciously withhold information or micromanage so the pattern is affirmed. He can stay “right,” about gripping to the vision. But this slows everything down and keeps real leverage (delegation, explore experiments, asymmetric moves) off the table. Growth will stall.
All because loosening the reigns feels like death.
Example 2: Founder is Racing
Another founder, equally successful on paper, runs a different invisible script: “If I slow down even for a second, it’ll all collapse.”
His default mood is wired, low-grade urgency with a constant low-level adrenaline hum. Every quiet week, every missed metric, every team member taking a vacation gets scanned for signs that momentum is slipping.
The payoff of this pattern is he gets to feel essential and in control.
The cost: the “explore” side (vs. exploit side) never gets funded or tested. Any experiment that isn’t immediate and “proven” feels like a threat to survival. Decisions default to grind instead of leverage.
Your Style of Living
That pattern is the same default lens most of us haul into every room. But each of us has a unique interpretive filter that we wake up into.
Easier to spot in someone else than it is to admit it’s running you.
What default style of living or mood do we bring into every interaction and every situation?
What unique and specific layer of interpretation do you wake up into that you’re not even aware of?
Seems it would be useful to know. Because it’s the base layer, it affects every aspect of our lives: work/ business, romance, family… what we focus on, your propensity to spot and jump on opportunities… how easily we get distracted or discouraged or inspired.
Without conscious intervention, we’ll continue to run on the same old forces: habits, social copying, reputational paranoia, status fragility, and the hidden payoffs of unconscious patterns (being right, avoiding blame, staying safely non-catastrophic). Playing it safe.
But the old forces keep you suspended in the chronic tension between what you secretly want and the pressures that reward the safe middle.
Take Control
What if we didn’t want to be run by default or by some pattern with a payoff. And instead, we wanted control?
To be the source. To define our own base layer of interpretation.
We’d first need to see the unknown-unknowns. We need to make it come to the surface. If it’s invisible to you, you have zero control.
Conventional decision-making, no matter how disciplined, only rearranges the circumstances inside the same box.
Asymmetric outcomes require a different kind of decision-making:
Non-automatic decision-making.
Interesting aside: what if there’s an ongoing internal conflict between conscious and unconscious decision-making authority inside each of us. Similar to Iain McGilchrist’s theory of the the dynamic between the two hemispheres of the brain: the left hemisphere’s grip on certainty versus the right’s openness to the unknown.