The world is terribly complex. Every day we make about 20,000 decisions, the brain researcher Ernst Poppel has once calculated. Granted, most of them are routine. In fact about 90 percent of them. If we would collect for every single decision all arguments, weigh them all against each other, assess and think through to its ultimate consequences, we would be dealing with the decision of buying a toothpaste a few days. And that's not natural.
When traveling it's different. There the routine gets out of control. The toothpaste for which you at home normally "decide", doesn't exist. Together with a lonely bicycle route it happens sometimes that you wrangle a few days with it. Imagine how it looks then with the non-routine decisions. The decision, for example, where our trip shall go on after Dubai. The Middle East is a dead end for cyclists in this days. Sooner or later you've to hop on a plane. And so we've virtually an endless selection. The multi-week super decision, so to speak. According to other studies, we would now have to switch immediately to a promising three-point strategy to avoid getting unhappy because of too long brooding. There are three ways to decide quickly: 1. set a time limit, 2. delegate the decision or 3. take a time-out from the decision. Ha, so easy as that! Take a time-out. That sounds really good.
For one week we get lost in the shopping malls of Dubai, look at movies in 3D, marvel at the indoor ski facility in the desert and celebrate new year with millions of people at the largest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa under a mega fireworks. An amazing world. We almost have success with our time-out, and we almost forgot the decision on how our journey should go on. But then the high cost of living in the Emirates makes us a spanner in the works. After one week only, it remains only point 1 for us to attack (delegating isn't easy for two) and to bring the entire decision thing shortly to an end. True to the motto of a couple of cyclists which is cycled around the world for eight years and has said at the end "oh you know, it doesn't matter where you ride actually,” we opt for Siberia.
A Russian Visa you get only in your home country. And although we could send our passports by DHL documents post easily home and then let the Visa organize through a visa agency, the Swiss Ambassador in Dubai advises us not to give the passports out of hand in the Emirates. Already we could have thrown our decision almost overboard, indulged in a further break in Oman and thus violate one of the fundamental insights in decision research (who has the opportunity to submit its decisions, 50 percent more time he needs to decide), as a good news from the Swiss consul of Kathmandu flutters in our Inbox: It is quite possible to stay in Nepal for some time without a passport. Of course, only after the entry and at our own risk. But just "quite possible... ". And so, twelve hours later we sit in the plane of Air Arabia with destination Kathmandu. Who can doubt the penetrating power of the three-point strategy as yet?
From Kathmandu we send our passports to Switzerland and at the same time let us send from home some of our winter equipment by mail. Without hesitation, we added the package list, two tubes of toothpaste Elmex, because who willingly tortures himself unnecessarily with routine decisions? Point 2 of the three-point strategy will help us immediately to figure out what we should do while waiting for our stuff from Switzerland. Two friends of us have traveled recently Nepal with their bikes and so we can delegate confidently the decision what is best doing here. They rave enthusiastic about the Annapurna round. That is why we fill two backpacks and grab us our bikes to emulate them.
We are experiencing twenty days in a stunning mountain landscape: Hardly tourists this time of year, good distant view, a hint of winter and snow in the valleys and the frozen Tilicho Lake. A good start for the upcoming adventure in Siberia. But in the end we are all-in. And so it doesn't fall hard on us to put our trust again in the third point of the three-point strategy, when the next decisions are collapsing on us. This time the time-out takes two weeks.
Unfortunately shifts in the preparation of a winter bike tour around Siberia, the ratio of 90 percent of routine decisions and 10 percent of important decisions to the detriment of routine decisions and we spend despite the three-point strategy a few days with brooding. Fortunately, however, we find in the parcel which has arrived from Switzerland, not just our half winter equipment and two tubes Elmex toothpaste, but also Christmas cookies, gingerbread, battery-powered candles and a kilo of chocolate, what unhappiness from the decision's disproportion to our surprise, ultimately put to an end. And so we must admit that we probably shouldn't count solely on the success of the three-point strategy in the future, but that in making decisions, other factors may play a role. Ah, the world is terribly complex!
Source of the three-point strategy: Decision Quicksand, How Trivial Choices Suck Us In (Aner Sela, Jonah Berger 2012)
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