One Decision-Making Heuristic That Will Make Your Life Better

Nugget by Naval Ravikant

Jan 24, 2025

Hey friend!

Today’s nugget comes from an old Periscope livestream that Naval Ravikant gave in the year 2018 (and someone gladly recorded it!).

It’s a great decision-making heuristic that has significantly helped me. Thus, it will likely be helpful to you too!

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👤 Doers

💡Nugget

🟠 Naval Ravikant
[A] decision-making heuristic that I use is… If you have two choices to make, such as:
“Do I tell this person A or do I tell them B?”
“Do I take job A or job B?”
“Do I make this sacrifice now, or do I go ahead and do what I want?”
If you have two choices, and they’re relatively equal choices (it looks 50-50 to you) and you can’t decide, take the path that is more difficult and more painful in the short-term. Because what’s actually going on is: One of these paths requires short-term pain, and the other one maybe requires pain further out in the future. And what your brain is doing (through conflict avoidance) is it’s trying to push off the short-term pain. And by definition, if the two are even (50-50) and one has short-term pain, that means it has long-term gain. And by the law of compound interest, the long-term gain is where you want to go towards anyway.

"All self-help boils down to choose long-term over short-term."

— Naval Ravikant

So, your brain is overvaluing the side that has the short-term happiness, and it’s trying to avoid the one with short-term pain.
So, you have to cancel that tendency out (and it’s a powerful subconscious tendency) by leaning into the pain.

This cognitive bias is known as the Hyperbolic Discounting:

- We "discount" our (subjective) value of rewards as they are pushed into the future.

- And it's "hyperbolic" because the rate of discount decreases over time (e.g./ There's a big difference between a reward now and within a year from now, but there's little difference between a reward in 20 years and 21 years. Obviously in the first case we assign a much bigger discount).

As most of you know, most of the gains in life come from suffering in the short-term, so you can get paid in the long-term. Working out (for me) is not fun. I suffer in the short-term. I feel that pain, but then in the long-term, I’m better off because I have muscles or I’m healthier. In the same way, if I am reading a book and I’m getting confused — like I can’t understand what’s going on — that’s just like working out and the muscle getting sore, but [now] is my brain being overwhelmed. But in the long run I’m getting smarter, because I’m absorbing new concepts at the edge of my capability.
So, you generally want to lean into things that have short-term pain, but have long-term gain.
My trainer, Jerzy Gregorek (also known as the creator of The Happy Body) has a beautiful short saying where he says: “Hard choices, easy life. Easy choices, hard life.” So, what he means by that is:
If you make the hard choices in the short-term (e.g. “I shouldn’t eat bad carbs or processed foods.” Or “I should go ahead and do the workout — which is difficult and I don’t feel like doing it”), then in the long-term you’re going to have an easy life.
But if you make the easy choices in the short-term (e.g. “I’m going to stay out drinking, I’m going to go party, I’m not going to do my work right now, I’m not going to meditate”…), then in the long-term you’re going to have a very difficult life. You will not have built up that self-discipline.
👉 Source Video

hyperbolic discounting vs leaning into the pain

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