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Yesterday I drove my son to work and, since we arrived early, we sat in the car and chatted. I’m not sure how we got onto the topic, but quite quickly, we began discussing the idea that the things people do are always the best they can do given who they are, what they know, and the circumstances they find themselves in.
To be honest, I’ve always been somewhat dismissive of the idea. I mean, really? Even when I goof up, I’m doing my best? And if everything we do is always our best on every occasion, then, so what? What more is there to discuss? Our conversation in the car, however, went in a direction I hadn’t considered before, and I enjoyed the opportunity to learn more about my son’s perspective.
An early topic we explored was how misleading hindsight can be. My son explained that he often reflects on past events and thinks about what he could do differently next time to make things better, but he insisted that, at that previous time, the decision he made was the best one he could have made.
It’s easy to look back over some past happening and spot various things that could have been different. You’re always looking back, though, from where you are now with all the learnings and experiences you have accumulated. You’re not reviewing that past situation from the perspective of the you you were then. In Daniel Kahneman’s (2011) fabulous book Thinking, Fast and Slow, he explains that “Memories are all we get to keep from our experience of living, and the only perspective that we can adopt as we think about our lives is therefore that of the remembering self.”
In terms of Kahneman’s (2011) reasoning, my son and I seemed to be discussing this topic as though there was an “experiencing self” who behaves moment-by-moment through time and then a “remembering self” who reviews that behavior. The remembering viewpoint, however, is not the same as the in-the-moment viewpoint.
I was starting to be convinced.
Our moment-by-moment behavior is always linked to one or more of the goals we have that exist within a massive goal network. Some goals are more important than others, and pursuing one goal can occasionally mess up another goal. Achieving the goal of “pass the salt” helps to ensure the more important goal of “have an enjoyable family dinner” gets met. Perhaps, though, the goal to pass the salt was set only a twinkling before you heard “cheers” and saw a glass extended to kerchink with yours. Do you delay the kerchink and pass the salt, or do the opposite?
No goal is an island.
And it can get really interesting when bodies with goals inside them mix with other goal-containing bodies. My good friend, Rick Marken, and I discuss these social interactions in our book Controlling People (Marken & Carey, 2016).
Everything we do, including all the decisions we make, keeps numerous goals in balance at the same time. The goals that demand the most attention will partly depend on you but will also depend on what’s happening in the environment. If a request for salt passing hadn’t been received from your surroundings, you wouldn’t have locked that in as a goal. Or if people sitting around you didn’t practice the custom of “cheers” then, likewise, kerchinking might not have been a goal.
Having a word or string of words appear doesn’t ever make you do anything. Receiving the words “pass the salt” means nothing on its own in terms of what a person does. But if the person is dining with others and wants to have an enjoyable meal, the words give some clues about one way in which the level of enjoyment can be maintained. It’s always an external event plus an internal want that determines what comes next.
That little clarification even helps with the idea of your best shot. The reason your efforts are always your best shot is because whatever you do, whenever you do it, you’re always acting to keep the difference between what is going on and what you want going on as small as possible.
Basically, life is the ceaseless business of monitoring and managing is-want separations. Decision-making is as simple and complex as that. We don’t tolerate is————————want, or is————want, or is——want for very long. In fact, we even prefer iswant to is-want. We’re always doing what we can and the best we can to zero the separation. Bill Powers’s (1998) delightful book Making Sense of Behavior is an easy-to-read but authoritative explanation of how we go about keeping is and want in touch with each other.
Can you do better than you did before? Probably. Are you doing the best you can right now? Definitely. Your iswant insistence demands it.
By the time my son went to start his shift, my perspective on this topic had changed and I was enjoying a flood of new ideas and possibilities that were marinating my mind. I had the sense that I still wanted to work on being better and improving myself in different areas, but I felt more relaxed and a little bit lighter about past events. I think, finally, I had realised the profound message in the words of the great Maya Angelou more deeply than I ever had before, Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.
Now, I get it. We are always doing the best we can. And when we know better, that becomes our new “best we can”.
For some reason, it occurred to me that I could enjoy both the best I have today and also the idea that today’s best might be tomorrow’s mediocre. And now I’m excited about the bests I’m yet to discover.
