Mental Traps_ The Overthinker's Guide to a Happier Life - Andre Kukla [6]
There are tasks that provide literally endless opportunities for amplification. However much we do in the service of these goals, it’s still possible to do more. If we want to be rich, there’s always more money to be made. We can always rehearse a speech one more time. If we keep looking, there’s always a chance that we’ll find a higher-scoring Scrabble word. And when we make a decision, there are always additional factors that may be taken into account. Having compared the academic reputation, athletic prowess, and architectural merits of several universities, we may also essay a guess as to where we’re most likely to find romance. Having discussed our options with a dozen people, we can always solicit the opinion of a thirteenth.
Of course there is a law of diminishing returns. Our second million dollars may not make enough difference in our life to be worth the trouble of making it. And our deliberations about schools must eventually reach levels of such minute significance or vast uncertainty that it isn’t worth the effort to carry the analysis further. This is the point where amplification begins.
We’re sometimes persuaded to go beyond this point by the thought that we can never really be sure that more work will prove to be useless. For all we know, one more minute of looking at the Scrabble board will reveal a place for our seven-letter word. The thirteenth informant may give us vastly better advice than the previous twelve. But if this line of reasoning is sound after twelve informants, it’s equally sound after thirteen. The next bit of effort may indeed be crucial—and so may the next bit after that, and the one after that. By this argument we’re led to the conclusion that we should study the Scrabble board forever and consult with every person in the world about our options.
The fallacy of such thinking is that it’s a cost-benefit analysis that leaves the cost entirely out of account. To be sure, it’s always possible that we may profit from more work. But it’s also certain that more work will cost us time and effort that we could choose to spend otherwise. The question is not whether more work on the present activity might benefit us, but whether it’s likelier to benefit us than the same amount of work invested elsewhere. This is the criterion for when to quit.
The application of this criterion is clearer in some cases than in others. At one extreme are situations where the cost of more work actually exceeds the potential benefit. Suppose we have to make nine different stops on a shopping expedition. Unless we plan a route beforehand, we’ll end up needlessly retracing our steps. But if we try to work out the very best route by estimating the time it would take for all 362,880 permutations of nine stops, our calculations will surely take longer than the amount of traveling time saved by the result. This is the most flagrant type of amplification. We don’t even need to inquire whether there are more profitable investments for our time. We would do better not to invest at all. This venture is a dead loss.
On the other hand, we can’t say precisely when our deliberations about universities turn into amplification. But we should at least know to quit if it finally becomes clear that we could be doing something more valuable. Even then we may be making a mistake. The very next bit of work might indeed have spelled the difference between success and failure. Freedom from mental traps is not omniscience. But we’re more likely to go wrong when we are trapped.
Work may be amplified literally to infinity in either of two directions—horizontally or vertically. In horizontal amplification, we think of more and more subtasks to perform in the service of achieving our objective—more people to interview, another rehearsal of our speech, another minute to look for a Scrabble word. Each additional subtask advances our cause less than the last. The value of our work never quite gets down to zero, however. Thus