When Choosing What to Do, Don't Be a Donkey
January 16, 2021
I was listening to Derek Sivers’s chapter in the Tools of Titans podcast when I heard him bring up a point which resonated with me so well that I immediately stopped to pay closer attention. Tim Ferris had asked him “What advice would you give to your 30-year-old self?” to which Sivers replied, “Don’t be a donkey.”
Sivers is referring to the fable Buridan’s Ass. It’s about a donkey who stands in the middle of a pile of hay and a bucket of water. The donkey looks back and forth trying to deciding between the hay or the water. Hay. Water. Hay. Water. He’s so indecisive that he eventually falls over and dies of both hunger and thirst.
A donkey doesn’t have the foresight to see that he can simply drink from the bucket of water first, and once he has quenched his thirst, he can go and eat some hay. His limiting quality is the belief that the choice he makes in the short term is what he must stick with in the long term. Donkeys can’t see the future and the potential it holds.
When it comes to making decisions about what to do with their lives, people often see themselves as being forced into a singular box. “I want to do so many things. What do I choose?” “I don’t think that there’s anything that I would want to do forever.” For me, this feeling is reoccurring, as I am deciding whether the path I’m currently on is one I could do for a long time. But a long time doesn’t mean forever.
I know what it’s like to try and pursue many different directions at once, only to make very little progress in any. Waking up every day and thinking about the overwhelming number of pursuits I have can stun me into spending all day deciding what the best choice is. Ultimately I don’t do anything. The longer I wait to make a decision, the more likely it is that nothing gets decided. I hate to admit it, but I can be an ass sometimes.
The problem is not the world telling you to choose one thing, but the mindset that if you don’t do everything you want to do right now, then none of them will happen. Most people only think in the short term and forget how many decades a human lifespan actually contains. If you’re reading this on the internet, then chances are that you still have a few decades left in you. You could gain a whole decade’s worth of experience in one area and still have time to switch to work on something else for the next decade. It doesn’t;t even have to be for that long before you switch. You just need the patience and commitment required to only pursue one or two things at a time.
Making Decisions
So now that you are trying to act less like a donkey and more like a human, how do you go about making a decision on what to do first? Serial entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuck makes tons of decisions every day running his companies. His decision-making tactics consist of listening to his intuition, setting good intentions, and then going for it.
”[…] the more you do, the more you learn. The more you learn from doing, the more trust and ease you’ll have with making decisions. The more trust you have with yourself in making decisions, the easier it’ll become to act when the time calls for it. - Gary Vaynerchuck
The better your intuition is, the more your decisions will align with who you are and what you want. Building intuition comes from taking action. It’s a cycle that requires execution as its fuel.
Execution is, of course, the hardest part because we all fear failure. But it’s not about whether we fail or succeed. We should do things out of curiosity to see what the outcome will be and then use that information to fuel our next move. When you view a decision as having a binary outcome of success or failure, the odds appear to be stacked heavily for failure. When you change your perspective to choose a pursuit with the goal of learning what will happen if you go for it, then that outcome will certainly be achieved.
The most important part is that you choose one thing and execute on it before you can talk yourself out of it.
If you look in the mirror and see a donkey, remember this: It is possible to accomplish everything you want, but you don’t need to do it all this week. With a realistic timeline, the discipline to actually start instead of being paralyzed with indecision, and a lot of patience, it can all be done.
✍️ Written by Lena Nguyen. Check out my Medium for more!