Are you basing your life choices on half-truths?

Pursue an MBA? Start a business? Accept that job offer? Relocate? Marry? How do you know you’re making the right choices?

As a tumultuous year draws to a close, I know many of you will reflect on the choices you have made and where those have led, and more importantly, contemplate the choices that lie ahead. As you do so, I would like to ask: are your life choices based on half-truths? I ask because the data set that informs our life choices, more often than not, resembles a sales pitch rather than a fact base.

The problem with sales pitches

Selling involves persuading people to sign up for propositions. Any such proposition has two components, or two halves: the benefit half (what you get) and the cost half (what you give). Since the goal of a sales pitch is to persuade (and not merely inform), sales pitches focus only on the benefit half, embellishing it to make it appear highly appealing and reinforcing it with repetition. But no one "sells" you on the cost half in quite the same way. Not even close. That’s largely left to the buyer's due diligence or self-discovery, which often occurs ex post facto, leading to “buyer’s remorse”.

Now, most of us think of sales as being limited to products like shampoos, apartments or cars. We often don’t realize is that we are being pitched to and sold on much more than just products. As we go through life, we are being sold on education systems, jobs and career paths, religions, philosophies, ideologies, theories, political candidates, wars and conflicts or social constructs like marriage or parenthood. What’s worse, not all salespeople look like or talk like, well, salespeople. They could be academicians, recruiters, priests, presidents, generals or even our own parents or significant others.

In fact, for every major choice you make in your life, you can be quite sure that someone is try to sell you a proposition. And each time that happens, you can be equally certain that you’re getting a half-truth by way of information, since a good sales pitch always subtly over-emphasizes the benefits and under-plays the associated costs. 

To illustrate, do you believe real estate developers could sell as many apartments if they focused as much on dramatizing the stress associated with servicing a 30-year mortgage as they do on highlighting the pleasures of home ownership? Would as many people buy into the proposition of a credit card if the banks shouted out the 24-36% interest rate they charge as loudly as the benefits? Fewer people would buy investment products if the risks were as well sold as the returns are, and not just mentioned in the fine print.

It get worse. Years of costly education are routinely sold on the promise of a brilliant future, yet we find millions of young people stuck for years with student loans that don’t get nearly as much attention. Similarly, high profile careers would find fewer takers if the low odds of success, the long hours and the high burnout rates were talked about as much as the salaries and the perks are touted. One could even argue that societies and religions have a vested interest in promoting the constructs of marriage, family and parenthood for the sake of social stability, and hence the totality of messaging around these constructs will tend to over-emphasize their wonderful benefits and under-play the associated costs, be those in terms of loss of personal freedom, financial costs or increased stress.

How prepared are we?

You might argue that our education prepares us to critically analyze information and make smart choices, taking into account both costs and benefits. I wish that were true, but I think people are much too gullible for comfort on that score. Witness the success of a whole slew of ads that promise you everything from the bizarre to the sublime: hair re-growth, reversion of aging, miraculous healing, a sure-fire day-trading formula that can make you millions just sitting at home or even the chance to own a piece of land on the moon. Surely smart and educated folks will not fall for these most obvious and blatant of deceptions, right? Wrong. I read recently that a website that sells ownership certificates for plots of lunar land for USD 100 a pop actually managed to sell several thousand of them in the US and in Europe, and millions of people globally have been scammed by the day-trading options operators, to name just two examples. How much more effective then, would be the sophisticated and subtle sales pitches delivered by credible experts?

Making better choices

So am I suggesting that you shouldn’t buy into anything at all and retreat into a cave instead? Certainly not. What I am suggesting is that as you make or review important life choices (jobs, marriage, parenthood, costly purchases), use the following three simple “hacks” to get to the full truth:

1. Talk to people who have actually experienced what you are about to buy into and who have no interest in whether you go for the proposition or not. Only they can tell you how real the benefits are, and how high the costs actually are.
2. Be skeptical and critical. If it looks too good to be true, it probably is. Always think, “where’s the catch”, because usually there is one.
3. Be objective. Smart sales pitches use the two basic human emotions – fear and greed – to cloud buyers' judgment. So find a technique that works for you to keep the emotion in check. For instance, what I often do is to pretend to be advising an imaginary friend on a choice I am making for myself, to see whether I can convince this friend to go for it. That helps to make me more objective in making choices. 

Remember,

1. Propositions you’re being pitched in life are not limited to products and services, but also include ideas, careers, relationships and almost all major life choices
2. “Salespeople” doing this pitching can be academicians, recruiters, priests, leaders and practically anyone else
3. the nicer the “salesperson” and the more seductive the sales pitch, the more skeptical you should be
4. always assume you’re being oversold on the benefits and undersold on the costs and seek to correct that inherent imbalance by being skeptical, critical and objective
5. recognize that costs you need to consider are not only financial but also emotional, psychological and temporal

Making informed, balanced choices that fully recognize both the costs and the benefits of various propositions will lead not only to you avoiding bad-for-you choices, but will also ensure you enter into major life decisions with realistic expectations and a mature awareness of what it takes to succeed. The result: greater success, less pain and more happiness! 

Happy choosing, and happy New Year!