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Brain-Based Transformational Solutions

Maximizer or Satisficer:
How Do You Choose?

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I first stumbled across the word “satisficer” (had to look it up) in The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz. In his book, he compares the way satisficers and those presumably on the other end of the spectrum—maximizers—go about making choices.

First, though, he claims that the two groups are defined by having different goals. Maximizers “seek and accept only the best,” while satisficers “settle for something that is good enough” without worrying that something else might be better.

Seeking and accepting only the best is not a goal, however; nor is settling for something that is good enough. Rather than being goals, seeking only the best and settling for good enough could be considered ways of operating, behaviors, attitudes, tendencies, or even drives. They play a part in how you go about trying to achieve a goal or accomplish something—and how you measure your success. But to call them goals entirely misses the point of what a goal (or objective) is. And that’s not inconsequential.

Maximizers Are Green

I’ve been revisiting this notion of satisficers and maximizers in light of a theory of personal operating systems I’m working on, as well as in terms of barriers to transformational change.

In regard to personal operating systems, of which there are three, I’m faced with another in a series of binary concepts. And once again, I don’t fit neatly at either end. Although I would generally and readily rank myself among the satisficers, there are areas in which I operate based on the high standards of the maximizers. The tyranny of the binary (I made that up, but it’s kind of a real thing) is probably a result of cognitive bias and the desire to oversimplify.

If the word didn’t already have sort of a definition associated with it, I would call the third way of operating “objectivizers,” meaning: deciding how to choose (what method to use) based on the objective—or, really, the desired outcome. It’s an accurate, if made up, way to describe it. And I’m not against making up words.

If you have been following the development of the personal operating systems, in general, those who have the teal operating system are most likely to be satisficers; those who have the green operating system are most likely to be maximizers; and those who have the purple operating system are most likely to be objectivizers.

What Works?

Maximizers, by striving to make the best choice—whether or not they can really be assured of having done so—are not focusing their attention on their objective or desired outcome as much as they are focusing it on the process and the end result of that process—getting “the best.” “The best” is an external frame of reference. It stands in, unsuccessfully, for a juicy desired outcome.

Schwartz points out how being a maximizer can lead to a lower level of satisfaction, for example, and a greater tendency toward rumination and regret. Satisficers appear to be happier than maximizers, but maybe they’re just in denial. I’m only partially joking. If satisficers really are all about “settling for good enough,” it doesn’t sound like they are focused on juicy desired outcomes any more than the maximizers are.

As a now self-identified objectivizer, I think I adopt the method of choosing that’s most likely to get me my desired outcome. The more focused I am on the desired outcome—and the more intentional I am about pursuing it—the more likely I am to shift between the maximizer-satisficer poles in order to hone in on it. That’s what works for me.

We all have tendencies to think in certain ways and act in certain ways; we all operate on autopilot much more of the time than we like to admit. But creating transformational change requires identifying a juicy desired outcome and pulling out all the stops to go after it rather than being attached to the way we prefer to operate.

Being a full-time maximizer won’t get you there, but neither will being a full-time satisficer.

Building Blocks of Creativity: Curiosity

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If we really want to understand and shape behavior, maybe we should look less at decision-making and more at curiosity. —David Brooks

Having an open mind and being open to experience go hand-in-hand. And if you’re open-minded, you’re curious. You don’t believe that what you know about something—anything—is all there is to know. You want to explore and you want to learn more. You’re not afraid to put yourself in unfamiliar situations or to expose yourself to people and ideas that challenge you or your beliefs.

Curiosity, by its nature, implies uncertainty and ambiguity. Your brain doesn’t like uncertainty, which is why the experience can be uncomfortable. But if you choose comfort and the illusion of certainty (because certainty is an illusion) over curiosity, you’re turning your back on the very characteristics that make humans human.

Besides, curiosity can also be rewarding. Mario Livio, astrophysicist and author of Why? What Makes Us Curious? says:

[The] lust for knowledge is associated with a pleasurable state, and in our brain activates regions that anticipate rewards.

It makes sense that curiosity activates reward pathways in our brain. Curiosity and openness to experience give us the ability to be inventive and creative, to solve complex (sometimes life-or-death) problems, to imagine things that don’t yet exist, and to accomplish great undertakings in the face of enormous odds.

Curiosity is the essence of human existence. ‘Who are we? Where are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going?’… I don’t know. I don’t have any answers to those questions. I don’t know what’s over there around the corner. But I want to find out. —Eugene Cernan

Curious, open-minded people see the world differently from other people, both literally—in terms of basic visual perception—and figuratively. They tend to screen out less visual information, so they sometimes see things others block out. And they “see” more possibilities as a result of being divergent (rather than convergent) thinkers.

Are You Intentional?

In order to be creative, we need to be able to change something in the world. But we also need to be able and willing to be changed by the world.

Of course, to a great extent we do create our own reality, so our interactive relationship with the world could be said to be creative. But the reality that we create for ourselves happens outside our awareness and outside our control. It’s pretty amazing, but we can’t take credit for it. It doesn’t require anything from us, and we can live our entire lives taking it for granted, having no curiosity about it and paying no attention to it whatsoever.

If you have no curiosity about yourself and your relationship with the world, you may want things to be different, but you’re unlikely to engage in the cognitive investigation and exploration that can lead to creativity and change. So you’re unlikely to do anything to change the status quo.

If you’re curious, however, the questions are more interesting—and more alive—than the answers. As a result, you never stop exploring. You take very little for granted. And you’re intentional about changing your brain, yourself, and your world.

What Will You Do Next?

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YOUR BRAIN is always trying to solve the same problem: what will you do next? It really, really wants to solve that problem because taking action is what it’s all about. It doesn’t want to take just any action, although the actions it takes might seem arbitrary or mysterious or at least contrary to the actions YOU would like it to take.

System 1 (the unconscious part of the brain that runs you) is what I refer to as YOUR BRAIN. System 2 (the conscious part of the brain you identify with) is what I refer to as YOU. YOUR BRAIN is not intellectually inclined; nor is it a long-term, goal-oriented, analytical, or reflective thinker. But it can definitely think on its feet, which is what it evolved to do. It’s fast and efficient.

The brain appears to be designed to solve problems related to surviving in an unstable outdoor environment, and to do so in nearly constant motion. —John Medina, Brain Rules

Since YOUR BRAIN is focused on survival, when it’s trying to solve the problem of what to do next, it looks to your past experience: what have you done in the same—or a similar—situation. Obviously, you survived taking the action you took then, and that’s a good enough endorsement for YOUR BRAIN.

Little hits of dopamine supplied within YOUR BRAIN’s reward system spur your brain on to keep solving this same problem of what to do next over and over and over again. So speed is also a factor. The quicker YOUR BRAIN can come up with an answer, the quicker it gets its reward.

Remember that in the moment, YOU have less than two-tenths of a second to veto YOUR BRAIN’s impulse. Given that YOUR BRAIN finds solving the problem of what to do next rewarding in and of itself, if it already has an answer based on what you have done before, it has absolutely no investment in considering alternatives. That would only delay delivery of the reward!

This is what you’re up against if you want to change your behavior: a fast and efficient system operating outside of your awareness that assesses situations before you’re even know you’re in them, determines the action you’re going to take now based on the action you took in the past, and gets rewarded not for astuteness or for pleasing YOU but for economy of mental/neural processing.

What’s Normal for You

Whatever you have done before is what you are extremely likely to do again. The best way to surmount the situation is to work with it, not against it. This three-step method for doing so falls into the category of simple but not easy:

A.  Identify what you want to change.
B.  Determine your desired outcome.
C.  Employ the appropriate contrivance (tool) to get you from A to B.

Since YOUR BRAIN is already getting rewarded each time it does what you don’t want it to do, you need to reward it each time it does what you do want it to do. Rewarding yourself for good behavior may seem contrived—meaning unnatural, awkward, or forced—to YOU. But it’s the language YOUR BRAIN understands.

H Is for Habits

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Habits are recurring, generally unconscious patterns of behavior you acquire through frequent repetition or that are learned over time. Since they operate outside conscious awareness (and control), you may suddenly discover, as I have, some habits you didn’t know you had.

Your brain creates habits, with or without your conscious participation, in order to operate more efficiently. It chunks repetitive behaviors and turns the chunks over to the basal ganglia so you don’t have to waste your precious and limited System 2 attention on them. So the habit habit is actually a labor-saving device for your brain, which means your brain is primed for habits.

Since we tend to identify with our conscious brain rather than our unconscious, we’re under the illusion that most of what we do is the result of conscious choice (behaviors are preceded by conscious intentions). So you may not be aware of how pervasive habits are in your life.

When a habit emerges, the brain stops fully participating in decision making. It stops working so hard, or diverts focus to other tasks. —Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit

Habits vs. Goals

Habits differ from goals in two significant ways:

  1. Goals are temporary; whether it’s three weeks or three years, there’s always an end point. Habits, on the other hand, are ongoing.
  2. Goals require conscious attention from beginning to completion. Habits, once in place, use System 1 attention. That’s why you may be unaware of some of your habits.

Creating a habit you want (or changing an existing habit) does require conscious attention initially, but only until System 1 takes it over, at which point it is initiated automatically as a result of something in the environment—a cue or a trigger.

Continual repetition of behaviors and thoughts results in highly reinforced neural connections, which are experienced as habits. …By adulthood, most emotional responses and behavioral impulses are conditioned: we think, feel, and behave more or less the same in the same states and social contexts over and over. Habits and the conditioned responses that compose them are processed in the brain in milliseconds, thousands of times faster than conscious decisions. —Steven Stosny, Ph.D.

According to Charles Duhigg, there are three parts to what he refers to as the habit loop: the cue, the routine, and the reward. The cue is what triggers the routine—the beginning of the habit loop—and the reward lets your brain know the loop is complete.

Habits: Good or Bad?

The word “habit” often conjures up the word “bad.” If you think of habits as bad—or as just something inconsequential that you do—you’ll have a harder time creating the habits you want to have.

Whether your habits are “good” or “bad,” they’re all the same to your brain. It doesn’t care what you think of your habits. All it cares about it is being efficient. Do anything often enough and it will become a habit. And habits, by their nature, are hard to change. Trying to exert willpower, using positive thinking, engaging in deep soul searching, or looking for the underlying cause of a habit are all fruitless endeavors. Unfortunately, you can’t have a heart-to-heart with your basal ganglia.

The main reason that conscious control of habits is limited is that it requires the most easily exhaustible and metabolically expensive of mental resources: focused attention. …When resources are limited, people are unable to deliberately choose or inhibit responses, and they become locked into repeating habits. …The autopilot, being virtually inexhaustible, wins the struggle more often. —Steven Stosny

The Value of Habits

It’s easy to see the positive, productive role of habits in the development of a skill or craft—that of a musician, an artist, a writer, a quilter, or a cook, for example. We generally expect that the more a musician practices her instrument, the more dishes a cook prepares, the better they will become at doing those things. A musician is unlikely to attain excellence if she only practices when she’s in the mood for it. Skillful musicians develop the habit of practicing regularly whether they’re in the mood for it or not. And they don’t have to be in the mood for it precisely because they’ve developed the habit. They don’t have to waste conscious attention or drain self-control resources by thinking about or deciding each time whether or not to practice.

Because habits don’t drain self-control resources to the same extent as non-habits, once a behavior becomes a habit, it frees up your conscious attention and makes achieving goals considerably easier. Habits and routines are actually essential to people who need to be creative on a regular basis.

Changing the status quo isn’t easy. The unconscious part of your brain, which might be said to be allergic to change, is way ahead of the conscious part, especially in familiar situations. It’s built to predict what’s likely to happen next, construct multiple response scenarios, and initiate the response it considers the most effective—not the response you consider most effective.

That’s why habits seem to have so much power. They are very familiar to your unconscious, which bases its predictions and responses on previous experience. You may want to go for a walk after dinner, but if you’ve been plopping down on the sofa every evening, your brain is going to “choose” the sofa over the walk. You may want to cut back on the donuts, but if you’re in the habit of grabbing one with your coffee at the office, that’s what your brain is programmed to “choose” to do.

You can make use of the power of habit by learning how to change the ones you don’t want and by creating habits you do want. In order to change an existing habit, you need to identify the cue and the reward and substitute a different behavior (routine) that gives you the same reward. To start a new habit, first decide what the behavior will be, and then choose a reward and a cue. It’s easier to start a new habit if you make the cue something you already do on a regular basis. Charles Duhigg explains the process in his Guide to Changing Habits.

One major caveat: There is no magic number of days that it takes to change or create a habit. But there is a highly effective type of magic you can apply; it’s called perseverance.

Part of the series A-Z: An Alphabet of Change.

Give Up Choice; Get What You Really Want

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Being clear about what you really want and why you want it is essential if you want to bring about a behavioral change. The what and the why provide you with direction: your highly desirable outcome. But if you don’t feel a sense of urgency about creating that outcome, you’re likely to continue operating on the assumption that you can choose whether or not to do what you need to do to get there.

If you want to change the status quo, the outcome you’re after has to be so compelling that you’re willing to give up the freedom to not have it. I’ll give you a personal example.

Vitality is a highly desirable outcome for me. One thing that contributes significantly to my level of vitality is a combination of physical activities, such as walking, hiking, using a treadmill, and strength training. I generally enjoy doing those things as much as I enjoy the results of doing them. A couple of years ago, I had a much more regular schedule that allowed me to walk nearly every morning, hike a couple of times a month, and get in four strength training sessions a week at the gym. But that hasn’t been the case for the past year.

When my schedule changed, my level of physical activity declined and became hit-or-miss instead of regular. At the beginning of last summer, I decided to start walking for 25-35 minutes every day. That seemed like something I could reasonably commit to. Although it wasn’t ideal, it was a start. So from May 31st through today, I have walked or walked and used a treadmill every single day, no exceptions.

In September, I decided to increase my target to 45 minutes a day and have reached that most days. In December, I took a deeper look at how important vitality really is to me (VERY!) and realized that walking wasn’t enough. I get a better aerobic workout on a treadmill. In fact, I’d made a few attempts to get over to the gym to use the treadmill in the fall, but didn’t get far because I felt like I had a choice as to whether or not to do it. On December 19th, after an insanely busy two weeks, I decided to start using the treadmill three times a week, no exceptions. Since the best I’d managed during the  previous 12 months was three times in one month, I may have been overly optimistic.

But even though my schedule isn’t any more accommodating than it was before, I am now using the treadmill three times a week. The difference is that having decided to do it, I stopped giving myself a choice. I schedule the day and time I’m going to go to the gym. I may have to reschedule once in a while, but because I have no choice, I always get my three sessions in.

Going to the gym brought home to me how much I miss strength training and how wonderful I felt when I was doing it. I had a portable weight bench in the garage and a few sets of hand weights in a closet, and I realized that even if I couldn’t go to the gym to do it, I could do some upper body strength training at home. So on January 1st, I decided to include three 30-minute sessions of upper-body strength training each week, no exceptions.

Of course, I feel much better as a result of all of the increased physical activity, but maintaining this schedule is far from easy or comfortable. It’s winter now, and on the days I’m scheduled to walk outside for 45 minutes, the wind chill might be in the mid-20s, and snow might be blowing directly in my face. Winter, to put it mildly, is not my favorite season. I’ve been known to hike in the Sandia foothills when the temperature was in the mid-90s. If I could dress in shorts, T-shirt, and sandals all year, I would be ecstatic. But as I’m writing this, we’ve just had three brutally windy and cold days in a row, the coldest so far this winter. If I gave myself a choice as to whether or not to put on multiple layers of clothing and subject myself to the elements, I would never do it.

But having made the decision to invest in my vitality, I’m willing to tolerate (not always silently) the discomfort and occasional pain in the moment for the medium and long-term outcomes I’m after. And because I don’t have a choice in the matter, I don’t waste any time whatsoever debating whether or not to follow through or trying to talk myself in or out of doing what I have decided to do.

When the path ahead is clear, why wouldn’t you take the obvious next step?

By giving up the freedom to not have it, I get to have what I really want. And although it isn’t always easy, it is astonishingly simple.

Note: This is the fourth in a series of posts. To follow the thread, select the category Making Different Choices in the box under Explore.

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joycelyn@farthertogo.com
505-332-8677