Get irrational; don’t keep options open

VITHAL C NADKARNI

BURN your boat. Chuck your parachute. Only then can you move forward, says Dan Ariely in his new book Predictably Irrational. Taking potshots at our tendency of keeping options open to minimise risks and optimise success, Ariely recommends peremptory action like that of Xiang Wu. The legendary Chinese General took his troops across the Yangtze into enemy territory and performed an experiment in decision-making. He crushed the troops’ cooking pots and burned their boats. Blocking your escape, he told the disbelieving (and disgruntled) troops, was done to help them to focus completely on the present goal of moving forward, to capture enemy territory. With nothing to lose except their lives or shirts (or both), the soldiers fought like never before and the General was completely vindicated in his defiance of ‘cover-your-base’ survivalist strategies. Conventional wisdom does suggest that he who runs away lives to fight another day. But the General reasoned what it does not spell out is that running away costs you that particular battle. This is also the message encoded in the Bhagvad Gita: stand up and fight. Don’t even think about whether you are going to win or lose. Do whatever needs to be done in a spirit of complete surrender to the cosmic principle of oneness without having to worry about success and failure. Such is the fight against vacillation, against dispersal of energy from necessary action into futile imagination. Narrowing our escape options concentrates our minds. But psychologists have also found that people find it extremely hard to exercise that option, perhaps because we may be hard-wired by evolution to look for escape routes for the survival of the species. Research involving hundreds of students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has found, for instance, that they could not bear to watch options vaporise even when it became apparent that it was pointless. The students couldn’t care less about future prospects, the scientists found. What goaded them was an intense desire to avoid immediate pain of having to let go of escape options. Closing a door was experienced as a loss, and people were willing to pay a price to avoid facing up to that emotion, Dr Ariely said. This is also borne by Daniel Kahneman’s Nobel-Prize research. The moral: Get irrational. Or get ‘divine’ advice to transcend innate human tendencies.