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The First Step to Rewiring Irrational Behaviour

is Awareness
What I learned from refusing to fill up my old car just in case it broke down.

Steve Fitz
Published in Mind Cafe
6 min read · Nov 24, 2021

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Photo by Artur Stanulevich on Unsplash

Here’s something I’m embarrassed to share.

I used to have a really old car. It was called Bessie — a name passed down from
owner to owner until it reached me. I didn't mind driving old Bessie. I felt like I was
caring for a senior citizen in their final years, and there’s no shame in that.

I’d also bought it real cheap. I figured I’d drive it until the day it broke down, and
then send it to the scrapyard, as it wouldn't be worth repairing.

I expected that day to come sooner rather than later, so I made the decision to never
fill the gas tank completely full.

If the car gives up the day after I spend 100$ filling it up, then I’d lose the gas/money, is
what I’d say to myself. So, instead, on each trip to the gas station, I’d only fill the tank
a quarter full.

I was a lot more conscious about money at that time in my life, and in my mind, I
was making a shrewd and calculated decision to avoid a situation where I might lose
some money.

But here’s the thing: Bessie ended up surviving much longer than anyone thought —
about 3 years. So I carried on that irrational behavior much longer than I ever
intended. Once I’d committed, it was hard to stop.

The Cost of my Irrational Behavior

Some things are better left uncalculated, but here goes…

Instead of going once per month to the gas station to fill up the tank and spending
100$, I went every week and put in 25$. It took time and effort to go there, find a
pump, and pay the cashier. (It also, ironically, took gas to make these extra trips.)

Calculating only my time, I estimate each extra trip took around 15 minutes. That
amounts to 45 minutes on unnecessary trips each month. Those 45 minutes per
month add up to 9 hours per year. Over 3 years, that comes to 27 hours.

Conclusion: I probably wasted about 27 hours of my time, all to avoid a potential

scenario where I’d lose less than 100$ of gas if the car happened to break down.

Now that’s irrational behavior — and, retrospectively, a hard pill to swallow.

Humans Are Irrational (and That Includes You)
We don’t act irrationally all the time, but very often we do.

Built-in flaws and blind spots — what behavioral psychologists call “cognitive biases”
— affect our thinking and decision-making. They can override our ability to
accurately weigh up the benefits and drawbacks of our actions and to truly think
logically.

The crazy thing is that most of the time we are oblivious to the fact they’re affecting
us.

“Not me!” you might say. But, according to decision-making experts, no one is
completely above these in-built “bugs” in our code. In his book Predictably Irrational,
Professor of psychology and behavioral economics Dan Ariely drops a red pill:

“We are all far less rational in our decision-making than standard economic theory
assumes. Our irrational behaviors are neither random nor senseless: they are systematic
and predictable. We all make the same types of mistakes over and over, because of the basic
wiring of our brains.”

When I think back to my behavior over the 3 years I drove that car, I now see how
irrational it was. Wasting so much time and energy to potentially avoid losing a little
money didn’t make any sense.

Knowing what I know now, I can see I fell prey to some classic biases and fallacies:
in particular, Sunk Cost Fallacy/Commitment Bias, with a little sprinkle of Loss
Aversion:

Sunk Cost Fallacy: The Sunk Cost Fallacy (sometimes called Commitment Bias)
describes our tendency to continue doing something if we have already invested
time, effort, or money into it, whether or not the current costs outweigh the
benefits. (In my case, I’d already invested/sunk time and effort into the decision I’d
made to only fill the tank a quarter full. To stop it would be to accept that my past
investment would be “lost/wasted.” My aversion to potentially losing the gas money
also played a factor — Loss Aversion Bias)
With Knowledge Comes Power
We are all susceptible to these cognitive biases and to making irrational decisions.

The good news is that being aware of that fact means we start to bring a healthy level
of skepticism to the decision-making process.

For example, we might cross-examine some decisions by asking a few simple

questions.

Am I possibly being affected by X bias?

Does this behavior still make sense?

If I could start from scratch today, would I still make the same decision?

Does this add up on paper (not just in my head)?

Did I ignore the negative evidence on purpose?

I’ve found that asking simple questions like these has helped me spot flaws in my
thinking, and helped me more objectively examine the pros and cons of particular
choices or decisions.

The Most Irrational Behavior of All

Although these biases often led my decision-making astray, looking back, I’ve
realized that my most irrational behaviors came from the fact that I never valued my
time.

In fact, I constantly traded it for far below “market value.”

I’d often carelessly “spend my time” to save a few bucks — like wasting an hour
researching online to get a better deal to save a few dollars; or trying to do
everything myself to save paying someone else, when I could have earned more
using that time to do something else.

I was the king of irrational Time/Money trades.

The book The 4-Hour-Work-Week first introduced to me the idea that you have to
think of your time as a valuable “currency.” It seems so obvious to me now, but at the
time it was a revelation.

Once I started to think of my time as a currency, it completely changed how I

behave. Whereas money used to be the only thing I’d consider, I now consider this
non-renewable resource as an important variable in all decisions I need to make.

Money comes and goes, but time just goes

The mindset shift of seeing your time as a valuable — or the most valuable —
resource that you’ll never get back leads us, I believe, to behave more rationally. It
also has an incredible power to shake up our priorities.

In my case, it made me reevaluate things in my life. I started to ask/ponder “deeper”

questions:

How much are 3 years working in a job I hate worth? — even if the money is great, I’ll
never get those years back.

How much would I pay when I’m 75 years old to be back at my current age and spend
the weekend doing things I can’t when I’m 75?

Where in my life can I spend money to save time? (hat-tip to Tim Ferriss for this one)

The answer to questions like these might be different for everyone — but they are
important questions to ask.

Tip: If you are like I used to be, and you tend to waste your time to save money,
here’s a good rule of thumb to implement: pick a dollar amount value for an hour of
your time (usually what you could earn per hour working). If the time you spend doing
something to save money will not save you that dollar amount or more, then it’s not worth
it. You should outsource it to someone else and enjoy your time.

Final Word & Takeaway

Learning about cognitive biases and other blind spots that affect us can help us
make better decisions.
Realizing that, ultimately, our time is our most valuable currency, and factoring it
into our decisions can help us to stop making irrational trades.

“Rationality is not a power you are born with but one you acquire through training
and practice,” says Robert Green in The Laws of Human Nature.

Yes, we are imperfect, but we are incredible learners — and we can learn to be more
rational.

Was else could be a more worthy investment of your time? If every decision you
make produces an outcome, then becoming more rational will likely produce better
outcomes and a better life for you.

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Decision Making Cognitive Bias Psychology Self Improvement Life Lessons

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Written by Steve Fitz

377 Followers · Writer for Mind Cafe

Thinker/Writer/Creator. MWC winner. Sharing practical tips & ideas on living a simpler, happier & more
creative life. Habit Engineer => rebootfactory.com