Why Who You Marry May Be Less Important Than What You Had For Lunch

Professor J,

Do you ever wonder if we spend an inordinate amount of time focused on the wrong things? 

There are a few very big decisions to make in life. Where to go to college or what to study, who to marry, what you want to do for a living, whether or not to have kids. People fret endlessly over them. We read books to help us decide, get counseling, enlist any number of advisers to walk us through the deciding process, and often look back and wonder if we made the right decision. Lots of other decisions cascade from these big ones but I wonder if we don't over think them and under think smaller decisions.

We should probably be more concerned with what we had for lunch today, or if we sat on the sofa for more than 4 hours watching television, or got a meal from a drive through. Because those decisions about our health, and other decisions we make many times a day, day in and day out for years have powerful cumulative effects over the years. They have a few things in common:

You make them several times a day.  What to have for dinner, whether or not to walk the dog or get up during commercials or read a book or buy a five dollar coffee are the things that make up ordinary days.

On the surface they look unimportant. They look so unimportant, in fact that if we were to give them the same amount of decision making effort we give other things, we'd look crazy. We'd also get very little done every day.

They aren't overly difficult. The hidden power of these decisions is that everyone else is making them every day. If your friend calls you and says he's thinking of proposing to his girlfriend, you aren't likely doing that today as well. But lunch? What's the big deal, right?

Here's the big deal:

They have a powerful cumulative effect. The myriad of tiny little decisions you are making each day work on the same principle as the law of compounded interest, which Albert Einstein described as "the greatest mathematical discovery of all time."  One of the things that makes it so powerful is that while you may not be using Algebra in your every day life you can apply the law of compounded interest. It's the everydayness of it and the added interest that makes it more important than a one time windfall or extra big tax refund.

Let's apply that principle to health instead of finances. Every year on New Years Eve we all plan our resolutions for the coming 365 days. We start big. We join a gym buy exercise equipment. We get excited and want to change. Soon after, something usually happens. We lose our motivation often because we don't see immediate results and the power of old habits lures us back to the sofa with a bag of chips. The long term effect of our big resolution is basically zero. I think it's because no one has taught us the power of a lifetime.

They are not easily undone. If you are 70 and have smoked and eaten a hamburger every day for 50 years, drastic change will not have the effect you want. Damage done to your lungs, heart, and other major organs will not be quickly reversed and is too often irreversible. But on the positive side daily exercise, a healthy diet, and focus on fitness will not be undermined by the occasional hot fudge sundae or margarita. The power lies in what you are doing over and over again.

It's not that difficult to get divorced and start over alone or quit your job to start your own business. Messy maybe, complicated--for sure. But it's not impossible. It is impossible to un-eat your last thousand meals,  un-smoke hundreds of packs of cigarettes, or un-spend money frittered away on things you bought on impulse.

What would be the difference between 20 years of taking Xanax and 20 years of meditation?

I call it the power of everyday. It's the tsunami of the thousands of tiny decisions you make over the course of a lifetime that have a cumulative effect on various aspects of life. You can  be building a powerful wave of good decisions or bad ones.