Friend's Perspective

Suppose you are deciding whether to call someone you would like to know better. Do you …

(A) Wait until you talk to her more before calling.

(B) Call her.

If you poll a group of guys about this dilemma, their responses are pretty hilarious. Most say they’d wait before calling, but when they’re asked what they’d counsel a friend to do in the same situation, they say, Go for it!

And come on, isn’t the right advice in this situation to go for it? Think about it using 10/10/10. On the 10-minute scale, if you decide to call the girl, you might dread every minute leading up to it, and if she seemed perplexed by your call, you might well be embarrassed. But in 10 months, you might have a friend or a girlfriend, or else you will have long since forgotten the whole thing. In 10 years, there’s a small chance you’re with your soul mate and no chance whatsoever that you’re still burning with shame.

All in all, it becomes clear this is a risk worth taking, and it’s easier to recognize that truth for other people than for ourselves.

The advice we give others, then, has two big advantages: It naturally prioritizes the most important factors in the decision, and it downplays short-term emotions. That’s why, in helping us to break a decision logjam, the single most effective question may be:

What would I tell my best friend to do in this situation?

It sounds simple, but next time you’re stuck on a decision, try it out. You’ll be surprised how effectively that question can clarify things. The two of us have talked to many people about thorny personal or professional decisions they were facing, and often they seemed flummoxed about the right thing to do. Then we’d ask them the “best friend” question, and almost always—often within a matter of seconds!—they’d come up with a clear answer. Usually, they were a bit surprised by their own clarity. When we’d ask, “Do you think maybe you should take your own advice?” they’d admit, “Yes, I guess I should.”

THE BIAS TO OVERWEIGHT short-term emotions can have paradoxical effects. Sometimes it makes us erratic and too quick to act, as when we react aggressively to a driver who cuts us off on the road. More commonly, though, short-term emotion has the opposite effect, making us slow and timid, reluctant to take action. We see too much complexity and it stymies us. We worry about what we must sacrifice to try something new. We distrust the unfamiliar. Together, these feelings make individuals and organizations biased toward the status quo.

A bias isn’t destiny. We can distance ourselves from these emotions by using some quick mental shifts—the time shifting of 10/10/10 or the perspective shifting of “What would I tell my best friend to do?” Those shifts let us see the outlines of the situation more clearly, and they help ensure that, in times when decisions are difficult, we’ll be able to make choices that are wiser and bolder.