A,

but

one more question for you, spencer, than i have a couple in the c and a, when i give other people the opportunity to hop in. Im, just a reminder for those guys, we're there. If you'd like to ask spencer question, you can use the c and a function at the bottom or abote the other questions. My last question for youand i have so many i could before a may we hand it off to the group, would be this notion of dycotomus thinking. So it's something that i've noticed when i talk to clients about making decisions. That particularly, maybe it's the type of clients who come to me, you know, you have these these cognitive distortions of start up founders or investors, where, you know, you need to be both contrarion and right. And so this tends to attract the type of people who see the world in very black and white ways. Ah, me know, steve jobs famouslyis like, this is either the greatest person that i've ever worked with, or this guy sucks. Ah, a recent example cline i was talking to the other day. Ahho. He's presenting me, hey, i'm stuck between these two paths of my life. A should try to build a unicorn, like a billion dollars start up, or an om thinking about just like selling all my possessions and going in a monastery and justlike working on my meditation for a while, and just, ye, how be is like complete opposite decision points. And it seems, it really reminds me of buddhism, or i would talk about walking the middle path, that there's a way that transcends and econciles this natural duality that we fall into, that everything is either black or white. And i know this is something you've talked about before. I'm curious, like, how do we identify this middle path, this option that we weren't considering? Yes,

so it's funny, we actually ran a study related to this. We built a tool called decision adviser, which you can find on clear thing dot org. Thet helps walk you through big life decisions. And in the process of building a tool, we ran some studies on it. And once stedy, we did as we randomized participants to either get a little thing saying, hey, you know, often people don't generate enough options for their decision. Why don't you come up with some more optionsb but we didn't make them do it. We just kind of suggestedi. And like i i think, if em rember quickly, none of them actually did it, even though we suggested it to them. Ah. Now, this is a small study, as we take it with a grand assault, but i think, but the other group, the other group, we actually just said, we're just notking to let you move forward in the study until you generate at least one other option you haven't thought of. And every one of them did it. They all generate another option. And thenwhen we looked at the end, after they'd gone throug the hole decision advisory tool, where they consider the decision for many diferent angles, and then they pack an option, about 20 % of the group that we'd force to generate another option actual ended up choosing the new option that they hadn't thought of before. A so that was superinteresting. And, you know, ok, it's a small study, but i think the general principle holds that very often there are more than two options, and yet, very often we anchor on two. And what i would says, for a small decision, no problem, just stick with two. You know, do i watch this moviy or that movie? Do i get carrots or mushrooms? Whatever? Fine. For a big life decision, thal, o, the lot hangs in the balance, two is just not enough. Like you really should just sit down and force yourself to generate more. And i recommend when you generate them, don't evaluate them during the process of generating them. Just come up with as many options as you can, then come back and then get rid of the junky ones after. But if you mix the kind of critiquing the options with the generation process, it tends to hold back your thinking. So, you know, one classic one that i just have seen a lot is people like, should i quit my job, or should stay with my job? And it's possible that those re your only two options, but it's also possible you could talk to your boss and say, hey, you know, i'm really interested in this topic. Cas it possible my role could change somewhat? Or maybe there's a lateral transfer at your company, or maybe your company offers moving down to part time, and then you could do another job on top of it, or whatever. I'm not saying that's available in your particular line of work. I'm just sayinga it might be, and it might be worth investigating. So very often there are other ways of thinking about your problem. Ah, it's probably notis probably not just two actual options.