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In the last issue, we explored how fear makes us risk-averse. But what fuels that behavior is that we think everything is permanent. 

Because we don’t factor in how much we evolve, we treat every decision like it has to last forever.

That is one of the biggest illusions of our time.

When we think about making a change, like starting a business or moving cities, we treat that decision like a tattoo. We assume that once we do the thing, it’s permanent. And it goes wrong, we end up scarred for life.

But risks are rarely like tattoos. They are usually more like jackets.

If you put one on and realize it doesn’t fit, then you take it off and try something else.

There is a well-known term for the type of thinking in which everything feels permanent: “The End of History Illusion.”  It explains how we believe we will change only a little in future, despite knowing that we have changed a lot in the past. 

Since we think we’re going to be alive for a long time, we live as if all our choices and decisions have permanent consequences. It adds more fuel to our pre-existing fear of taking risks.

This mental model has been well popularized by Jeff Bezos, and it’s used to sort risks into two types of doors:

One-Way Doors are like your home’s architecture design. Once construction begins with those blueprints, you can’t easily make any changes. It’s hard to reverse one-way doors. Decisions like selling your company or having a child are all one way door decisions—there’s no going back.

Two-Way Doors are like your wall paint. If you don’t like the color in your bedroom, you can change it easily. Decisions like starting a side project or trying a new routine belong here, they are agile and open to experimentation. 

But the flaw in our psyche is that we have this habit of treating every decision like a one way door, so we just don’t experiment. 

We think so hard about changing one thing in our routine as if it will shake our whole world, and this makes us feel like things are fixed. I’ve seen many people who want to quit coffee but don’t try to, because they don’t want to take the risk of getting a headache. So they stick by the cup of coffee, every day of their life, breaking the possibility of living a life free from coffee addiction.

If you feel paralyzed by a decision, odds are high that you think it’s a one-way door decision that’s going to last forever. Use these two tips to shatter this illusion:

We live in a world that is malleable and ultimately designed by us. Very few choices seal our fate.

We see so much sameness in the world because people are afraid to take risks that could result in change. They want to wait for a guarantee that their risk will pay off. 

Guarantees don’t exist.

Reversibility does.

You can try new things. And if they don't work, you can just turn around and keep moving in another direction.

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