For the record, I’m not saying travel makes your decisions better, although it might. What it definitely does is it makes you a better decision maker.
There is a whole science to decision making, which I’m going to ignore in this post. With the exception of one book that is only indirectly related to decision making: Why Most Things Fail.
In that book, Paul Ormerod draws a parallel between biological and economic evolution and arrives at the conclusion that like most species, most companies go extinct in the long run and that chance plays a much bigger role in who stays alive and who doesn’t than we like to think. It’s not merely the survival of the fittest (or the one who makes the best decisions), but the fittest who happened to be in the right place at the right time.
He goes on attacking conventional economic theory by stating that the profit maximising economic agent doesn’t exist. We never have access to all the information there is to be had and even if we did, we would not be able to process it all. Which is why rather than trying to make the best decision ever, we try making good enough decisions.
Malcolm Gladwell arrives at a similar conclusion in his book, Blink. It’s not my favourite book of all times – too much fluff around a little bit of juice -, but it succeeds in making one thing clear: oftentimes we’re better off making a gut decision than a rational one. We make gut decisions in the blink of an eye, while carefully considering all the alternatives and weighing the pros and cons may take ages and lead to a similar success rate statistically.
And that’s where travel becomes your ally.
By simply overwhelming you with decisions you have to make all the time, travel teaches you to:
- prioritize between less and more important decisions,
- make less important decisions literally in the blink of an eye,
- make important decisions quicker,
- accept the consequences of your decisions,
- learn from the bad decisions you make,
- realise that not making a decision is also making a decision, and usually not the right one.
How does travel do all that?
By breaking your routines.
Routines, like taking the same route to work every morning, going to the same restaurant and having the daily menu, going to the same gym, same shops etc. make our lives easier. We made the choice once and don’t have to make it all over again every day.
That’s all gone while travelling. You have to make these choices every day. So instead of running the routine, making these decisions becomes routine.
As you get better and better at it, you’ll know what you want to order before the waiter brings out the menu. (When sampling local delicacies is not the objective of course. But even if it is, you might just play “menu roulette”.)
And that’s why you’ll have more mental energy to focus on the big decisions that really matter. Like whether you should throw all your plans of travelling out of the window and stay somewhere for what might be the love of your life. Or not.
I’m not sure whether any of this applies if you run a hedge fund and need to decide about which paper to buy or sell. But to become a better decision maker in your personal life, I can’t think of a better education than travelling.
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