Trade offs

We all make trade-offs — all the time.

We all live in a finite world, with infinite choices. We only have so many hours in a day, and we all will only live a finite number of years. And our choices are partially determined by the previous choices we’ve made. There is no “pure” choice.

When we make decisions, we’re often making a trade-off between two or more things. But we often don’t think about the trade-offs we make — because most of our choices are made out of habit. As the saying goes, “We are what we repeatedly do.” (Note: I just learned this wasn’t said by Aristotle! Instead, Will Durant coined the phrase in the early 20th century to summarize some of Aristotle’s writings.)

https://medium.com/the-mission/my-favourite-quote-of-all-time-is-a-misattribution-66356f22843d

Trade-offs can be between time and money or between our own needs and wants and other people’s. 

Choosing to send children to school in the face of a pandemic or make them wear masks or to be vaccinated are all about trade-offs. Putting sanctions on Russia over their invasion of Ukraine involves trade-offs - our gas is going up in price.

If we want to live in an environment with the benefits of society, then we need to give up some of our own desires to live within the rules of that society. How do we balance them?

We each have our own way of doing this, sometimes without thinking it through, but sometimes we do spend a lot of time pondering our choices.

Those who are passionate about a particular cause try not to make a “pure” choice. I met a woman who was so passionate about climate change that she worked hard to convince her friends not to travel via airplane. Another example is high schooler and climate advocate Greta Thunberg who traveled to the U.S. to speak at a climate summit and who won’t fly. She took sailboat across the Atlantic Ocean. Although she had planned to stay in the western hemisphere for some months, she had to change her plans quickly when the next conference was relocated to Europe and had to scramble to find another sailboat to take her to Portugal.   

But every one of these decisions involves trade-offs because this is the real world. Greta traded convenience and time for lack of impact on the climate. 

When we make a trade-off, that doesn’t mean we don’t value the other factors; we just place less importance on them. They just get less weight in the decision. Greta placed less importance on her time and convenience than on her contribution to climate change.

The person you are engaging with is also making trade-offs. They’re just different than yours are.

But we focus only on the end result and don’t take into account that they are also (probably) considering the same factors you are, they’re just weighting them differently.

What if instead of fighting about the decision, we asked questions like:

“What factors did you consider in making your decision? Which ones were more important? What made them the most important? How likely are those to occur?  What other factors did you consider but not place much importance on?  Why was that?” 

If we understand the thought process that someone uses, we may understand their choices at a different level and may even come to agreement. They may say something that surprises us or changes our mind.

And if we follow the model (ALAR) I’ve been suggesting, we’ll get to the point where (hopefully) they’ll listen to us.

Ask: Ask questions such as the ones above

Listen: Harder than it sounds!

Affirm: Agree with something — surely you can find something to agree with! Agree with one of the things they considered.

Respond: Talk about the factors you placed a different weight on or things you considered that they didn’t.

This is a way to have a discussion and not a yelling match!

To make sure that you learn as many new tools as you can, please subscribe.