Get it Done by Ayelet Fishbach

Author:Ayelet Fishbach
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK

WHAT MAKES MEANS RIGHT

Pandas enjoy eating bamboo more than I’ll ever enjoy anything I have ever eaten or will ever eat. I know this despite not having any direct way of assessing panda bears’ subjective enjoyment of their food. I know because no single food ever fully and finally satisfies my palate. The panda’s diet, in comparison, consists almost entirely of the leaves, stems, and shoots of bamboo. For the panda, satisfying hunger (their goal) is associated with one activity only: eating bamboo. Bamboo is by definition the most delicious food the panda will ever eat. Nothing else comes close.

We humans, in contrast, have many foods that satisfy our hunger. And each of these foods also satisfies a host of other considerations, such as meeting our budget and impacting our health goals; our foods are both equifinal and multifinal. Given the number of associations between the foods we eat and the goals they serve, there’s no single food we would happily resign ourselves to eating for the rest of our lives.

This is just one example of how having too many ways to satisfy a goal can result in not having a single way that feels totally right. By the principle of maximizing attainment, we look for activities that serve several goals, such as an exercise that also helps us get around. The problem with having one activity that serves multiple goals is that with each additional goal it serves, our perception that this activity is the “right” means for us decreases.

The mental link between a means (be it an activity, an object, a person, or a bamboo shoot) and a goal weakens the more other mental links exist for that means and for that goal. If a means serves several goals or if a goal has several means, the means-goal link is diluted. When the mental association between the path to the goal and the goal itself is weaker, the goal is less likely to come to mind when pursuing this path, and the path is less likely to come to mind when looking for ways to achieve the goal.

When the mental link is strong, an activity, an object, or a person may seem highly instrumental for achieving the goal. Suppose you can’t think of a better way to exercise than biking. So biking is strongly related to exercise in your mind. But if you recognize that there are other ways to exercise that you’d like just as well (biking is equifinal), or that there are other goals you can achieve by biking (biking is multifinal), biking seems less instrumental for exercising. You can think of many other ways to stay in shape and also many other reasons to bike. As a result, your dedication to biking for exercise might dwindle.

Because of this dilution, we often forgo the principle of maximizing attainment in favor of “unifinal” means—actions, objects, or people that help us pursue one goal only and are therefore strongly associated with that single goal.

As you may recall, we had a very similar discussion about dilution in Chapter 3.

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