Executive Summary
One can argue that financial planning is, at its core, about navigating different choices and trade-offs. Some decisions can have outsized practical, financial, and emotional impacts, such as when to retire, quit a job, or start a business. Succeeding and failing will each bring high consequences, and many people opt to "keep their options open"… but does that, too, have a cost?
In this 201st episode of Kitces & Carl, Michael Kitces and Carl Richards discuss the comparative advantages to making a decision vs. keeping one's options open – and when it may make sense to commit.
A lot has been said about "sampling" different lifestyles – as a low-stakes example, it is helpful to rent a paddleboard a few times before buying one. Similarly, it can be helpful to spend a prolonged amount of time in the country or city a person wants to live in. But sometimes, trying to keep "all options open" means that no progress is actually made; in other words, a person stays stagnant. Sometimes, while an ‘irrevocable' decision can be daunting, it can also lead to greater happiness than a safer, reversible choice. The reality is that while we all need to hedge decisions at times, there is a case to be made for committing and ‘burning' the proverbial bridge that needs to be crossed. In committing to something, we also give ourselves permission to dedicate our energy to it – which can yield greater results than the less committed decision to "leave doors open".
Alternatively, it may be worth evaluating the energy spent analyzing (and over-analyzing!) different decisions, compared to the energy of commitment. For example, if someone has ten units of energy, how much of that energy should be spent analyzing the pros and cons of a decision? How much that of energy should be spent ‘making' the decision the right one? For some decisions, it can genuinely be worth spending a prolonged amount of time deliberating, but often, it may be worth it to ‘simply' make a decision and keep moving.
In client conversations, advisors can not only provide a complete view of their financial flexibility and options, but also help clients think through the emotional side of these decisions. For example, advisors can ask, what if the ‘default' option were to disappear? What would the client do instead? Ultimately, the advisor may also end up as an accountability partner when a client has been stuck in deliberation for a prolonged amount of time. Even something as simple as flagging that a client has been in a state of indecision for a prolonged period of time can be helpful.
Ultimately, the key point is that while some decisions are challenging (and intimidating!) to make, as the saying goes, not making a choice is still a choice. The question to advisors – and their clients – is, what to do with their limited time, attention, and other capital. With some level of continual curiosity and momentum, advisors and their clients can gradually right-size their lives to discover what they truly want!
Authors:
***Editor's Note: Can't get enough of Kitces & Carl? Neither can we, which is why we've released it as a podcast as well! Check it out on all the usual podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts (iTunes), Spotify, and YouTube Music.
Show Notes
- Trading Options For Energy: Behavior Gap Episode 1525, with David Epstein
- Decisions and revisions: the affective forecasting of changeable outcomes by Daniel Gilbert and Jane Ebert
- Ann Garcia
- Kitces & Carl Ep 86: Aligning Client Capital To Goals (Which Are Only Clarified Over Time)
Kitces & Carl Transcript
Michael: Well, greetings, Carl.
Carl: Hello, Michael, how are you?
Michael: I'm doing well. I'm doing well. I am excited to hear what you have to talk about today, though, because I hear you've been pondering on new things. And so I just want to hear the new things. I'm all there. I'm not even in the warm-up mode today. I just want to hear it today.
Carl: Let's go.
The Cost Of Not Making A Decision [00:35]
Michael: You told me you've been thinking things that are interesting, and so I want to hear the interesting things. You've tempted me. You've drawn me.
Carl: The very important disclaimer is that they're interesting to me. I've figured out that my work is nothing more than an adventure journal. It may not be interesting to anybody else. I might be drinking my own whiskey. But broadly speaking, I've been on this kick. I just didn't realize it. I finally found almost a unifying thread of the work of the last decade. I need more time to formalize that, but as an entry point into this conversation, I'll give you an idea. The only kind of financial planning I'm interested in is the kind of financial planning that helps people, if you think about this as a Venn diagram, align their use of capital in one circle. I think we talked about this recently, actually. Use of capital is money, energy, time, and attention with what's important to them in the other circle. What's important to them, or what matters to them? That's nothing new. We've talked about this recently. The part of it that I've just been fascinated by is how do we help people figure out what matters to them? Then once they get some sense of it, how do we help them reorganize their lives around it to the degree that they want to?
Michael: How do we get them to take action? You said this matters and you want to align to it. You said your family really matters and that you work too many hours to your job. What are you actually going to do to realign your time in your work and your job to spend more time with your family because you said that's what matters?
Carl: That's right. There's so much involved in just that simple sentence. How do we figure out the family...? Yeah. How do we even figure out the family matter? Does it really...? Okay, great. How do we start running little experiments? I don't feel you can think your way through that. You have to act your way through that. The moment you go to act, one thing that's really fascinating is you have to start...And this is what I was on this kick lately about and recorded a bunch of episodes of "Behavior Gap Radio". Then we had David Epstein, the author of Range and more recently Inside the Box, we had him as a guest at the Society of Advice. It was an amazing discussion about this. As soon as you go to do a thing, and we're all familiar with this, financial planning is nothing more than trade-offs. There's almost never a correct answer. It's just the best trade-off. As soon as you have a set of things to choose from, you've got options. You know what? You were taught about options. What were you taught about options?
Michael: You keep your options open, Carl. You keep your options open.
Carl: Yeah, free option. Never, never get rid of a free option. Keep your options open. Don't burn any bridges. Keep the door open. I've been so curious about what is it that happens to us when we go to close options. If I'm going to make a decision to do that thing, it means that probably seven other things need to say no to, and maybe one or two that were really close. And so, I've been curious about this. When is keeping options open risky? When are we in terrain where the terrain, the kind of decision we're making is requiring us to burn the bridges, burn the boats, close the options? That's what I've been thinking about lately.
Michael: So what makes it risky?
Carl: Keeping an option open?
Michael: Yeah. It's one thing...I think many of us have had the moments ourselves, or seen with clients, various versions of what essentially is analysis paralysis. There's so many options. There's so many choices. I'm trying to analyze all the choices because I'm weighing them because it's a trade-off and I don't want to pick the wrong one. And so I think most of us have seen or experienced some version of inaction due to keeping my options open. At least to me, maybe this is a distinction without a difference to you. That feels different to me than literally saying, no, no, no, keeping your options open is risky. It's worse. What makes it worse and not just...?
Carl: It's such a good question.
Michael: Analysis paralysis.
Carl: Yeah. If it puts keeping...There are certain decisions and certain times...and again, I'm being very careful. I don't know where the boundary conditions are on these things. This is stuff I'm still working out, but there are certain conditions under which keeping options open puts me at risk of not living the life I want to live. So that's why it's risky. What's super interesting about this is we often have to make a decision...in fact, I'd almost want to go so far as to say we have to make a decision and take action in order to learn what we really care about. We'll only learn what we really care about by taking some action. We can only think so much about these things. I think I would really to take up paddle boarding. I can sit around and read and ask a bunch of friends and make pros and cons list and, as we use the verb now, we can ‘Kitces' it to death.
Michael: Thank you, Carl.
Carl: Still one of my favorite things. We can analyze it, we can build lots of spreadsheets, but in the end, we got to say no to something else and go take the paddle board out. The act of taking the paddle board out will reveal information to us. Without that act, without that decision to say no to something else and commit to something, we're at risk of missing out on the life we want to live. That's how it's risky. How does that land?
Michael: I hear that and I'm like , but Carl, this is why I want to keep my options open. Maybe we need a better analogy than the...Yeah, so I'll go rent a paddle board for a day and then if I like it, I'll go further with it. But I don't want to over-commit to a lifetime of paddle boarding, Carl, just to go this route. That's why I just do small tests and keep my options open.
Carl: I think to some degree, the example is not as strong as we need, but let's just stick with it anyway because I think it still proves the point. There's almost a trick we have to play on our own brains. "I am committed to paddle boarding." And then there's this other little thing that's going on that's like , "Don't worry, you're just trying this out." But without the commitment...In fact, there's a really good study, and I can't remember the authors of the study. Let me see if...I'm going to look at my notes real fast because I think I have it right here. Well, we can always reference the authors later. They went to...and I'm going to paraphrase. It was Gilbert and Ebert. Gilbert and Ebert, they went to students in a photography class. Okay, so first let me just make a statement and then we'll walk through the study. We predictably overvalue options and undervalue commitment.
And what this research showed was when you ask somebody...they asked people, "Do you think your friends and colleagues should value keeping their options open?" Here was the study, 20 photographs, you have to pick one. Half the group were told, "After you pick one, you can't go back." In fact, I think they were told the other 19 are going to be destroyed or gone. The other group, "Pick one. Don't worry, in the next..." I think there was something like four to nine days or whatever. "If you change your mind, you can always switch it out." So one kept options open, one didn't. They were asked who is going to be happier. I can't remember the number I told you in the...84%, it was 84.3% or something. Let's just say 80%-plus said of course the people that have their options open are going to be happier. Then they did the study. The people who made an irrevocable decision were happier. Their happiness with their choice grew is the way the study said. The other group, their happiness with their choice did not grow. So the act of committing to the thing made you more likely...And I think a bit of this is also confirmation bias played in your favor. I think it's like, as soon as you decide you want a red car, you're going to see lots of red cars.
Michael: I was thinking, there's a part of me with this that hears once they committed to the irrevocable decision, their happiness with their choice grew and I'm listening to this like, well, yeah, it kind of had to since they burned the ships on anything else, but maybe that's literally the point. Is that the point?
Carl: Yeah.
Michael: Because if I kept my options open, I can just spend whatever it is, the next nine days/the rest of my life continuing to second guess the decision I've already made.
Carl: That's exactly right. Wonder which one I would...You know what else is interesting? There's two things that I want to just point...We can decide which one to talk about first. One is just satisficing versus maximizing or optimizing, right. Just decide that something's good enough and then you grow to love it, right? You spend your energy...And the other one that's really interesting to me that, as I was working through this, I started wondering about was, is there a bit...or is it not about keeping your options open? It's actually about avoiding loss. Right? You're actually just trying to avoid the decision of closing doors that you may already know need to be closed. Right? And the fact of closing doors, we're just trying to avoid, because we're so loss averse. So yeah, once we've made the decision and there's no option to go back, that's the whole point. We'll learn to love the thing more. And by the way, this does not mean that keeping options open is never the right choice. I'm just saying it's an important piece of the toolkit to start to think about what kind of terrain are we in? Are we in terrain where making a decision...?
Measuring The (Emotional) Cost Of Evaluating Your Options[12:28]
Carl: Let me just throw one more thing at you and then I'll stop and we can pull threads apart. I call this the Ann Garcia principle. So Ann Garcia is one of my favorite financial planners and she was at one of the retreats here at the house, and at the retreat we were talking about decision-making and she put language to how I make decisions, how she makes decisions, but she put language to it, which is why I call it the Ann Garcia principle. Let's just pretend you have ten units of energy to make a decision and then live with it. And again, impossible to measure. Let's just pretend you have ten units of energy to make a decision and then live with it. And again, it's impossible to measure, whatever. And a lot of people will spend...and again, it depends on the type of decision that I call that the terrain. I'll run into people who predictably will spend eight of those units researching the decision before they make it, and then two living with it or...and again, super...I feel I'm paraphrasing stuff here, but just rough...
Michael: Yeah, I get the gist.
Carl: And Ann was like, "No, I make the decision and then spend all my units making it the right one." And so you'd flip that almost, you'd be like, two units on researching the decision, make it, and then spend eight on making it the right one, which I love. What happens to your body when you hear that?
Michael: Yeah, I immediately get squeamish.
Carl: That's so interesting.
Michael: It feels like some expression of literally how our brains are wired differently as wonderfully diverse humans that...This kind of reminds me of some episode we probably did five or six years ago, talking about something to the effect of, wrong words because you had better ones, but like, do you analyze it to death before you act or do you just get going and fake it until you make it and grow into it as you go? We had this conversation years ago.
Carl: Did we have it around decision-making, like more information, better decision, that conversation?
Michael: I think so. I think so. I'd have to go back and look. I'm remembering this only because we were such polar opposites to it that my conclusion to it just...there's a level of just take the leap and I'll figure it out that you were just really comfortable with and I was like, that's just not how I'm wired. I just can't do it that way. I hear this and I start thinking of the same thing, like you do this and Ann does this, she articulates it. I certainly know and can think of folks that I've known in my life through the years who do that as well. And I look, I'm like, but yeah, I don't do that. Now, at the same time, I don't know, I feel like I'm probably still a, I don't know, six plus four unit. If you want to draw that parallel to the extent that I know folks that are eight, nine, ten units and analyze it to death and never get there. I analyze a lot, but I do actually take action. That's how I ended up making a bunch of businesses. I do get there. I just have to analyze a certain amount of death before I get there. But other folks just don't. I guess you know that I spend my time making my decision the right one, not agonizing over my decision.
Carl: Can we investigate that just a little bit? Because I think there's two...I'm almost two-by-two matrixing here, but I don't even want to spend the time trying to figure it. I think there are two vectors on which this thing...One is maybe a natural tendency, right? Which you're pointing to. But I also think there are types of decisions, and I call that terrain. Can you think of times when you've just been like, "Yeah, you know what, I don't want to spend much time on that, I just decide to move on?"
Michael: Generically, just things to me that are lower stakes decisions to me, everything from, "Oh my gosh, I just cannot deal with figuring out what I'm going to eat for dinner tonight. We'll just..." Whatever any of the kids or my spouse says is good enough. Which I guess is a satisficing thing, as you said earlier. But I've had...thinking of something more recently, maybe contextually a little more appropriate. My Bluetooth headset died. I have a phone headset, earpiece, mouth thing that I like to walk around with when I walk and talk and do calls, and the one I had died. And I'm one of those people who can absolutely make a spreadsheet with four rows and 11 columns comparing the major things. I could probably use AI to slightly expedite that for myself. And so I was like, "Okay, no, I'm just going to look up a major popular provider. It's got decent ratings. Good enough. I do not have the time and mental head space to actually deal with a thorough analysis. I'm going to buy one that's good enough and I'll just figure out how to get it properly connected to my phone and make it work in my work habits. And I just need to move on."
But it came back to me some version of it's not that high stakes of a decision. At the end of the day, I'm just going to deal with this with something that works well enough and move on to other things that are more heavier, more impactful. I don't know if I'm taking us out of the kinds of decisions that you were trying to highlight around optionality. Either way, I was going to buy one of these things. I need to do phone calls. The old one was dead. So the analysis was only going to go so long. It wasn't going to stay analysis paralysis for ten years on buying a headset.
Carl: Totally. No, I just think that's a good example of the type of decision that you're comfortable just closing out all the options and say, "I'm going to do this one." And then, as we move up, I think there is something insightful...and again, I'm not suggesting this is the right way to make decisions. I just think it's interesting to realize that we have this belief that options are always good and that all options, especially a free one, should be kept for as long as possible. And there are times...Think of major decisions. There are times like, okay, how about marriage?
Michael: I was going to say, I think about major context of much higher stakes, right? I'm going to quit my job. I'm getting married. I'm having kids. I'm starting a business. I guess we want to do our industry one. I'm going to pick a niche. How about a...Right? Just you're like, "Oh, I can't do that. I have to leave my options open for all my clients." Where it feels like this becomes a little bit more of an expression that just...I guess resonates a little bit more to me at the stakes that you're talking about. Yes. I know you just raised your hands. Anyone known someone who had a lot of trouble finding a spouse and getting married because no one was good enough and they always wanted to keep their options open to find someone better? And eventually then maybe that became a challenge.
Carl: And even after marriage, how many of us know people who sort of kept one option open?
Michael: Yeah, and created some other problems.
The Benefits Of Making A Choice And Building Momentum [20:50]
Carl: Really predictable of that causing a problem of some sort. So I think that's interesting because here's the other sentence I've been really playing around with. It's the act of committing changes what is possible. Right? So the very act of closing all the other doors and saying, "I'm going to do this." And I can't remember...I've been meaning to grab that quote. "As soon as somebody commits, the universe conspires to help them," or whatever that...There's some great quote to that. It sounds magic, but I think what it is, is it changes your field of vision. Maybe there is some magic involved there, but it also just sort of changes your field of vision because you're committed to a thing.
Michael: I know there is brain science to that part. I think it's the reticular activating system, which is once you've got something fresh in your mind, you start to notice other things that connect to it. This is the infamous you buy a new red Volkswagen and you notice every other Volkswagen and every other red car out there. And you go, "I didn't really realize there were so many red Volkswagens out there." But once you got one and it's fresh in your mind, your brain starts seeing all of them and they were there all the time, but you just never had a reason to notice them until your brain queued it up, in that case, because you made a commitment to buy one yourself. So maybe that's part of what ties this. There is brain science to once your brain gets attenuated on something, you start noticing and connecting other dots around it.
Carl: Yeah. And I think of this a lot with client work, like where do we want to live? What job do I want to take? Do we want the second home? What are the activities we want to engage in? There's endless analysis we could do around, okay, what is our family do on vacation? And we've spent so much time on this because the garage is full of decisions we've made of...pack rats, and now there's a motorcycle in there, and there never was golf clubs, but at one point there threatened to be golf clubs. But helping clients see that, look, sometimes keeping options open is the right call. And sometimes we can even play games with that. What if we just made a someday maybe list and we put it over here to the side? I have a someday maybe list that I'm destroying in the next two months. I've decided September 15th to December 15th is my I'm going to clean up all open commitments, all open options. I'm going to go through them very carefully. Because the someday maybe list is distracting me from ten years of compounding on one idea. And let me just...that idea of we can't because you can't preserve full optionality and receive the benefit of full commitment.
Michael: Take that further. You say that again. You can't receive the full benefit of optionality...
Carl: You can't preserve full optionality and, while at the same time, receiving the full potential of commitment. And I think we stumbled upon one, which I'm sure there's something wrong with this and I'm sure I'm going to get in trouble for it, but we stumbled upon one with the marriage thing, right? That's a really great example.
Michael: You say that and I'm like, I feel like I've literally heard some version of that sentence applied specifically in the context of marriage.
Carl: Yeah. I would take it from my wife's perspective. I think looking back, she made an uncharacteristic decision, because she typically thinks very carefully about things. I think she spent one-and-a-half units deciding whether this was a good idea and she has now spent 32 years of making it a good idea. And I'm really grateful for it. If she had had her eye on what else could be better or the grass is always greener, right? Instead, there's no way, in my mind at least, I don't care what...nobody else needs to think this way about my marriage, but in my mind, there's no way we could receive the benefit of this kind of commitment if either one of us weren't all in. Now, of course, in the back of your mind, you always knew that like, hey, if for some reason there are times when there's irreconcilable differences that the people are just going to be happier, of course, that was the "psst" in the back of the mind. But so that's what is we can't retain optionality and receive the full benefit of commitment. And I want to be clear again about this, there is terrain on which keeping my options open is a good idea, dare I say a life-saving idea.
Michael: But I'm an options preserver. If you just keep throwing me a life preserver, I'm never going to make a commitment on it.
Carl: But see, you do though. See, this is where I think we came to last time was like, we are much closer in this than we all think.
Michael: I'm not a nine-one split on that. It's actually an interesting measurement, as you put it. I guess folks who are listening to this, you can envision this. You've got your ten units of energy, you're going to spend some of them trying to make the right decision, you're going to spend the rest of them trying to make the decision right afterwards, doing what you need to do to make sure that turned out to be the right decision, how do you split those units? So I guess, Carl, you're somewhere in the two-eight or one-nine range.
Carl: For most things. And let me just mention, I know when I get pushed into the...when I get into four or five range, I can feel it in my body. I'm frustrated. I just want out of there. Sometimes I just have to really talk to myself like, "Hang in here, hang in here. This is too important. You got to decide."
Michael: I feel there is a plus or minus two thing. If you tried to pull me under four, I would probably get very anxious that we're making this too fast. And if you tried to pull me up to an eight or nine, even at some point I get frustrated like, can we just...
Carl: Can we just move on?
Michael: ...make the decision and move on at this point? We're past the point of diminishing returns on how much we can improve on this decision by continuing to analyze it. But does that mean we're all just kind of wired to someplace on our spectrum? "Know thyself", there's some benefit for that.
The Case For Removing "Option B" And Fully Committing [27:57]
Michael: It is what it is, but I guess my question is like, how are we trying to move someone? Maybe that's a client. Maybe that's ourselves. If they're way out on the options end and you are trying to convince them not to stay there.
Carl: Yeah. That's a really fun exercise for me, like what...
Michael: For we who like options, we very much like to hang out in options land and keeping our options open. And you keep throwing me a life preserver of, well, there's all these circumstances where you can keep your options open. I'm like, yeah, all of them.
Carl: Right. No, here's some of the things that came up with my conversation with David Epstein. And these are tools we've talked about before. First of all, I think we tried let's remove...sometimes these are high-stake things, but there's a point at which...and I really think it's embodied where intuition needs to take over. My wife calls it the sun salutation moment. It's like, no matter where you are on that curve, you're a two unit or you're an eight unit, this is a completely arbitrary scale now, but there's a moment at which you can learn to recognize, I have enough information. I have enough. Because, you're right, if you typically like to make decisions with six units of research and you're in eight, you're going to start feeling a certain way. So learning just to feel like, okay, I've got enough information.
The second thing I think that's...so how does that feel in your body? I know how it feels in my body. And if we had time, we could have a long discussion about that. It's something we do at the retreats. Because the body will tell us long before the mind will catch up that we're there. And the second thing, I think we can always make the next decision smaller. If we're stuck, make the next decision smaller. So that the experiment we're going to run, it's hard to...you can think about commitment levels leading up to major decisions. And again, marriage is a great example. There are commitment levels leading up to those major decisions. Well, you can make smaller increments if you want. And the third thing that I to do is like, make it playful. Even if it's a really heavy decision, let's remove some of the weight by playing it like, "Hey, could we just play a game here?" And one of the games that's really fun to play is remove the default choice just for a minute. And you tell people, "Hey, totally relax. Don't worry. We're just..."
Michael: Like giving an example of just like, what is this in real time?
Carl: Yeah. For instance, what you think you would choose or what you normally decide, or the legacy choice. One version of this is the overnight test, which we've talked about before. So if I remove what you think you would choose or I remove what you normally...like with your headset, "Okay, you can't buy that one. What are you going to do now? I know you would normally do this or you feel that's the right choice. Just for a minute, let's take that one away just for a minute." And I think just playing games where we start to realize maybe the stakes aren't quite as high as we thought, or maybe by playing this game we're not getting any new information, then we might just reinsert the default choice.
Michael: I'm more struck by the other end though.
Carl: What's the other end?
Michael: As an options-leaning person, make small incremental decisions to test things. Yeah, that's what I do. You know why I do that, Carl? Leaves my options open.
Carl: We are slowly shutting options down though.
Michael: Yeah, but...
Carl: You're narrowing in on the range of outcomes.
Michael: At varying paces, depending on...varying paces of narrowing, depending on the circumstances. I'm more struck by your comments at the other end. "You can't preserve full optionality while at the same time receiving the full potential of commitment. The act of committing changes what's possible." You've made a few statements here that, to me, get much more to the opposite extreme of...I don't know, it's one thing to poke at we who like to keep our options open about maybe keeping our options open a little bit too long and being a little bit slow to choices or pulling some triggers. It's a whole other thing when you say, no, no, no, you're literally foreclosing on certain outcomes that might've been better because you outright undermine them by pushing for optionality. It's like, that's a much stronger shift in frame and context here that my gut, for being someone that likes to keep their options open, is like, nah, I keep my options open. But I can validate this of...
I look at things like major decisions I've made from getting married, having kids, deciding to leave a prior advisory firm to launch a business, picking business partners to work with and build things with. Most of the big things happened when eventually a commitment choice was made generally involving another person, and then we had to live down that road and figure out what we've done with or to ourselves and figure it out. Because life's still uncertain and fuzzy on the other end of that. But those were all turning points that started with a commitment, just so that I'm reflecting on them, mostly to another person, sometimes to self.
Carl: I love that. That's the thread I...I just pulled out my notes from my conversation with David and we were using the word "constraints," but I think this is very similar. Maybe constraints, maybe closing down options doesn't just help us execute once we know what matters. This was a note I had for the...Maybe constraints help us discover what matters. That's a completely different thing. And I think you're pointing the same thing, which is like, what would you rather choose, keeping your options open for projects for the next decade or picking one and compounding it for ten years?
Michael: Yeah. So that's the distinction to me. I guess it's some version of what was in Cortés' burn the ships kind of moment. This is not unique to my observation. I look at people who have taken leaps of entrepreneurship and starting their own businesses and overwhelmingly the ones that were the most successful in some way, shape, or form by choice or circumstances had had some kind of "burn the ships" moment.
Carl: There was no other option.
Michael: There was no plan B.
Carl: There was no option.
Michael: They got fired or they accidentally or deliberately burned a bridge on the way out or whatever it was. There was no plan B. They had to make it work. And so they figured out how to do so. And the ones that kept their options open with the safe fallback option almost always ended out reverting to the fallback. I think it's some version of, what is it, if you...I forget what the saying is. If you you plan to lose...Oh, I'm going to mess up the thing. If you keep your options open to lose, you're planning to lose. Someone knows the sports saying that I'm completely blanking on right now.
Carl: Yeah, I think...look, we started with...this to me is this little kind of twist here that we've gotten to at the end that the act...it turns out there is a little...there is research behind the idea that the act that committing changes what becomes possible and that we systemically overvalue options and undervalue commitment. Now, what that means and the implications and the applications in the planning world are really interesting and something I want to keep exploring because I think it's super...it feels like there was an idea in finance, all free options should always be kept that escaped into the real world and it wasn't suited for the real world. That might be true on a spreadsheet maybe, like a balance sheet. But I don't think it's true for our lives.
Michael: Well, at some point you're into...What was it? The Andrew Carnegie quote, "The way you become rich is you put all your eggs in one basket and then you watch that basket very closely." Diversify, you focus on a thing, and then you watch it very closely and make that thing work for you.
Carl: And does that apply to meaning and craft and...? There's something there that's very interesting. If the goal is to help people live meaningful lives, maybe it's time to burn some bridges.
Michael: Well, on that cheerful note, Carl, I can't wrap it better than that.
Carl: That was so good. Thanks, Michael.
Michael: Thank you, Carl.
