The next time you’re deciding between rival options, one which is primary and the other which is secondary, ask yourself this question: “What would Xiang Yu do?”
Xiang Yu was a Chinese imperial general in the third century B.C.E. who took his troops across the Zhang River on a raid into enemy territory. To his troops’ astonishment, he ordered their cooking pots crushed and their sailing ships sunk.
He explained that he was imposing on them a necessity for attaining victory over their opponents. What he said was surely motivating, but it wasn’t really appreciated by many of his loyal soldiers as they watched their vessels sink and tents go up in flames. But the genius of General Xiang Yu’s conviction would be validated both on the battlefield and in modern social science research. General Xiang Yu was a rare exception to the norm, a veteran leader who was highly respected for his many conquests and who achieved enormous success.
He is featured in an enlightening publication, which introduces a fascinating investigation into predictably irrational human behavior, such as the tendency for keeping multiple options open. Most people can’t marshal the will for painful choices, including students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In an experiment that investigated decision-making, hundreds of students from MIT couldn’t bear to let their options vanish, even though it was clear that they would profit from doing so.
The experiment revolved around a game that eliminated the excuses we usually have for refusing to let go. In the real world, we can always say, “It’s good to preserve our options.” Want a good example? A teenager is exhausted from soccer, ballet, piano and language lessons, but her parents won’t stop any one of them because they might come in handy someday!
In the experiment sessions, students played a computer game that provided cash behind three doors appearing on the screen. The rule was that the more cash you earned, the better player you were, given a total of 100 clicks. Every time the students first opened a door by clicking on it, they would use up one click but wouldn’t get anything. However, each subsequent click on that door would earn them a fluctuating sum of cash, with one door always revealing more than the others. The important part of the rule was that each door switch, even having no cash value, would also use up one of the 100 clicks. Therefore, the winning strategy was to quickly check all the three doors first and then keep clicking on the one with the seemingly highest rewards.
While playing the game, the students noticed a modified visual element: Any door left unclicked for a short while would shrink in size and vanish. Since they already understood the game, they should have ignored the vanishing doors. Nevertheless, they hurried to click on the lesser doors before they vanished, trying to keep them open. As a result, they wasted so many clicks rushing back to the vanishing doors that they lost cash in the end. Why were the students so attached to the lesser doors? They would probably protest that they were clinging to the doors to keep future options open, but that isn’t the true factor.
Instead of the excuse to maintain future options open, underneath it all the students’ desire was to avoid the immediate, though temporary, pain of watching options close. Closing a door on an option was experienced as a loss, and the students were willing to pay a big price to avoid the emotion of loss. In the experiment, the price was easily measured in lost cash. In life, the corresponding costs, such as wasted time or missed opportunities, are usually less obvious.
As is stated in the publication, “Sometimes these doors are closing too slowly for us to see them vanishing. We may work more hours at our jobs without realizing that the childhood of our sons and daughters is slipping away.”
So, what can be done to restore the balance in our lives? One answer is to implement more prohibitions on overbooking. We can work to reduce options on our own, delegating tasks to others and even giving away ideas for others to pursue. In marriage, we create a situation where we promise not to keep options open. We close doors and announce to others that we’ve closed them. We should make a conscious effort to lessen our load (resign from committees, prune holiday card lists, rethink hobbies, etc.) and remember the lessons of door closers like Xiang Yu.
In other words, we are encouraged to discard those things that seem to have outward merit in favor of those things that actually enrich our lives. We are naturally prejudiced to believe that more is better, but the experiment conducted at MIT provides a dose of reality that strongly suggests otherwise.
What price do we pay for trying to have more and more in life? What pleasure and satisfaction can be derived from focusing our energy and attention in a more concentrated fashion? Surely, we will have our respective answers.
Consider these important questions: Will we have more by always increasing our options or will we have more with fewer, carefully chosen options? What doors should we close in order to allow the right windows of opportunity and happiness to open?