I met a friend one winter night for a couple beers and a bite to eat. We sat at the upstairs bar in Redbones, a Davis square BBQ restaurant. There were twenty-four beers on the draft list.
For me, I prefer to look at the entire beer list before ordering a drink. I think this is why I like places with a limited number of options. In most places, I don’t even glance at the bottle or can list - I just go straight to the draft list in order to cut down on the number of choices. The twenty-four options at Redbones might have been a tad past the point of having just enough options and I took a little longer than I preferred before making a selection.
After our beers arrived, we noticed a roulette wheel on the wall behind the bar. This wheel was broken up into twenty-four sections. A whiteboard next to the wheel assigned numbers to draft beers. The way the wheel worked was a customer would spin the wheel, match it to the assignment on the whiteboard, and buy the corresponding beer. The price was based on the menu so the wheel served only a decision-making function.
As customers came up from time to time to spin the wheel, I watched closely and put myself in their position. During one spin, I came to a sudden realization: I would be happy with only four of the twenty-four options.
The realization reminded me of times in the past when I’d come to a sudden understanding about my preferences. These moments would come just after I’d made a decision or ceded my decision-making power. In these instances, it was almost like my gut took over for my brain and brought me to the conclusion I’d failed to reach via thought.
There is probably a larger lesson here. Maybe there is something that happens in the mind when we make a commitment (or alter our mental states, or whatever). I’m sure it is being examined right now by some kind of study I'll mock on TOA three years from now.
In the meantime, I’m willing to try a simpler thing. Why not just get a roulette wheel to make my marginal decisions? Even a coin would do the trick. Just assign options to one side or the other and give it a toss. If I find myself hoping for heads or rooting for tails, I’ll have learned something important about what I actually want.
And if the coin bounces off the ground before I have my epiphany? Reader, I can’t think of a surer sign that in the end all decisions are fifty-fifty, after all. In those cases, perhaps the best decision maker is indeed random chance.
