The Psychology of Making Better Decisions | Mark Manson

The Entrepreneur's Studio 

The Psychology of Better Decisions | Mark Manson

Why your daily behavior reveals what you actually want and what to do when your actions and your goals don't match.

Topics Covered:

• Why what you're willing to give up matters more than what you want
• How bad definitions keep people optimizing for the wrong things
• The "minimum viable action" method for breaking through inertia

Most of us believe we know what we want. We say it out loud, we write it in journals, we set the goal. But what if the clearest signal of what you actually want isn't what you say — it's what you do? In this Reflections episode of The Entrepreneur's Studio, bestselling author Mark Manson cuts through the noise of conventional goal-setting to reveal a more honest and more useful way to understand yourself.

Mark's core argument is quietly radical: wanting something and wanting the cost of that thing are two completely different experiences. The people who actually achieve their goals aren't the ones with the most desire, they're the ones who genuinely enjoy the struggle that comes with it. When there's a gap between your stated ambitions and your daily behavior, he says, the behavior is telling you the truth.

That gap often comes down to what Mark calls a "legibility problem." If you're optimizing for a poorly defined outcome in business, in health, in relationships, no amount of effort will get you where you want to go. The fix isn't more hustle. It's stepping back to question whether the goal you're chasing is actually the right one, using what he calls the "Why Game": asking why, repeatedly, until your motivation either loops back to something genuine or unravels into something worth examining.

For entrepreneurs and business owners, the practical takeaway is direct: stop waiting for motivation to arrive before you act. Start small enough that it's almost embarrassing. Show up. Do one thing. Because momentum doesn't come from inspiration; it comes from movement.

• Why your behavior is a more honest signal of your values than your words
• How to use the "minimum viable action" to build momentum when you're stuck
• Why asking "why" repeatedly can reveal whether you're chasing the right goal

"If your behavior is not lining up with the things that you say you want, then you're probably just kidding yourself." — Mark Manson

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Transcript

Chris Allen 0:08

Welcome to the Entrepreneur Studio Reflections. In today's reflection, we're hearing from Mark Manson on the psychology of making better decisions, why most people stay stuck, and the surprising reason your behavior says more about what you want than your words ever will. In this conversation, Mark unpacks the danger of optimizing for the wrong things and why lasting change often starts in our smallest actions. If you've been wrestling with a big decision, feeling stuck between options, or struggling to follow through on the things you say matter most, this episode offers a practical framework for getting unstuck. One of the things that I've really enjoyed about your work is this idea of the psychology of making better decisions, choosing what really matters. And I just wonder if there's this crystallized or this distilled thing about, you know, decision making that is kind of the primary way you think about making decisions.

SPEAKER_00 1:11

Yeah. I think about this in a very contrarian way, which is I try not to think about what I want necessarily, although that is important. I try to think about what I'm willing to give up because it's it's easy to want things, right? We all want lots of things. We all we all want money and we want, you know, to be admired and to be popular and all sorts of stuff. But like the real question is what are we willing to give up? What opportunities are we willing to pass on? What struggles are we willing to take on? That really kind of dictates uh who we are as a person. And in my opinion, it also dictates what sorts of results we get in life. Um, if you look at anybody who becomes excellent at any sort of skill set or or vocation, right? Like it is probably because they actually enjoy the challenges of that particular skill or or or occupation. Um but what you see over and over again is that people tell themselves that they they they they should want something. Oh wow. And they don't want to admit that they don't actually want to, you know, bear the costs or make the sacrifices to have that thing. And so it's almost like they they'd rather like it's they want to want this something. Whereas if you actually wanted the thing, you would also want the costs associated with the thing.

Chris Allen 2:31

You know, I think one of the biggest change moments for me was this idea of a verbal reality versus, you know, what's real, right? Like, so I I had this, and it what I'm the what's making me think about this is this idea that you just said that was like, you know, I am wanting, I I am supposed to want something, right? Or like if you want to change something about your life, and you're like, well, I bought the book, yeah, you know, or I've I've read the book, but like what are you doing to do the work to actually change and to get out of this? If I say it, it is so, or if I'm doing it, it is so, if I'm executing on it.

SPEAKER_00 3:11

And it it and it's it's amazing our ability for self-delusion. I'll I'll give you a really uh tangible example of something that probably everybody will relate to. So I have a friend, he's in his late 30s, he wants to settle down and start a family, right? He's single, he's had a number of long-term relationships, he's he's dating again, and he's very explicit. He's like, I want to settle down, I want to start a family. But when you actually go hang out with him and sp spend a weekend with him, right? He is still acting like a 25-year-old in a frat house. Like that is kind of his lifestyle, his mindset, the way he sees girls, the way he sees dating. Um, he hasn't totally grown up yet. And so it's a bit of a conundrum because if you ask him, like, what do you want? He'll say, I want to settle down and have a relationship. But then he's out till 4 a.m. on Friday night and he's uh, you know, ditching a really nice girl because she's too boring for him, right? And it's it's like, well, clearly you don't want that. Yeah. Yeah. Because if you did, you would be behaving differently. And so I think the point you bring up is is totally on the head in that it's there's often a mismatch between our our thoughts and and the verbal desire and the actual behavior, right? And it's like the behavior is what you actually want. And if if your behavior is not lining up with the things that you say you want, then you're probably just kidding yourself.

Chris Allen 4:46

Okay, that was awesome. The behavior is what you actually want. Okay, that was super good. There's this exercise that, you know, I think you need to go through if the behavior is actually what you want, you know, living inside of your core values is kind of like a huge thing. And what decisions you you know make and the business decisions and all these things, if you really think about it, right? Whatever you hold to your core value is the behavior that tends to show up. And when you're acting outside of those values, you you tend to not be in your sort of best self. Yes. The sort of value systems thing is a big part of what you talk about. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:24

And it's it's it's difficult because we often get distracted from our own values. And I think a lot of us are aware of this, right? Like it's it's it's the classic like, I want to be healthy, I want to get up early, I want to be more disciplined, but I don't do it. Right. And it's ultimately the reason it comes down to is that I don't want the costs that are associated with it. And so for me, the advice that I tend to give is I say, you need to find the way to want the costs. So you need to find a way to enjoy the burden of the thing that you value, right? So in this case, it would be something like um, okay, I if I hate getting up at six in the morning and working out first thing, how can I make this fun? How can I make this interesting? You know, can I join a class or a club? Can I get a friend to do it with me? Can we have maybe like a little bit of a competition, like gamify it a little bit? Because the the funny thing about human psychology is that generally are we we only start liking things after we've benefited from it. And so the thing that's so difficult with behavior change is that we when when you first implement the change into your life, you're only aware of the downsides. You're not really experiencing the upsides yet. And then you have to find a way to enjoy it enough, to stick with it long enough, to start experiencing the upsides, start feeling that burst of energy every morning at 6 a.m. Start waking up excited to go to your, you know, spin class or whatever you've decided it is. Um for your your psycho your psychology kind of then follows suit. We we tend to get it the wrong way around. We we assume that it starts with motivation in the mind, and then that is what causes us to act. It's it's backwards. You act first, you experience the benefit, and then you start be to become motivated to do it more.

Chris Allen 7:20

Love that. I mean, you were mentioning your friend earlier. We've all had people in our lives and ourselves that have probably been stuck before. Why do you think people get stuck?

SPEAKER_00 7:29

I think a lot of it is a legibility issue. Um it's like that friend of mine. I've tried to have a couple conversations with him, and and it it's interesting simply because he has certain definitions uh around dating and relationships that are probably not the most useful definitions. It it's uh I'll draw a business analogy, right? Like it's if you define a metric poorly in, say, a marketing campaign, you're probably gonna get a bad result, right? And it and it, you could have the best creative, you could have like amazing copywriters, you could like totally your team could totally crush the execution of everything. But if that metric that you're optimizing for is wrong, then it's not gonna go well. And I it's the same in our lives as well. Like if we have a bad definition of intimacy, or if we have a bad definition of health, or if we have a bad definition of productivity, then we're gonna optimize for the wrong thing. And and this is what this is like where we get it to come full circle. This is this is where we come back to like how I often feel contrarian about everything, is I see so much productivity advice or relationship advice or or whatever. That's like getting people to optimize for poor definitions. And uh, and if you if you don't have the thing defined well in the first place, then like no matter how much work you do on it, you you're just gonna go in the wrong direction.

Chris Allen 8:53

What are some good ways like people can rewire? You know what I mean? Like if they're stuck, they've got these bad definitions. Um, you know, the idea that people really only change when the pain of not changing is greater than the pain of changing, right? What do you think are some of the ways that people can kind of get unstuck and start to get new definitions and start to try new things to try and rewire some of those definitions?

SPEAKER_00 9:19

Yeah. So there are a few different kind of games you can play with your own head. What you just said about, you know, the pain of not changing needs to exceed the pain of changing. That's true to a large extent. And you can, but you can kind of shift your perspective to kind of play with that. So one way to do it is um to do something that I call it the minimum viable action, um, which is like take whatever you aspire to do and just break it down into the smallest chunks possible, break it down into steps, substeps, mini-steps, tiny nano steps until you get to the point where the the step in front of you feels so easy you can't imagine not doing it. Um, it's funny, I was, I remember I was going through um, I meditated pretty consistently when I was younger. I got very into Buddhism and meditated a lot. And then I kind of like drifted away from it. And I went through a phase maybe five or six years ago where I I tried to get back into it, but I was having trouble keeping up with it. And it just wasn't really taking for whatever reason, not in the same way it did when I was younger. And I remember I was talking to a friend of mine who who is a meditation teacher and and a Buddhist, and I was like, I don't know, man. Like, I'm just not, for whatever reason, it's just not coming back. Like I just can't stick with it. And he said, Well, I I'm pretty sure you can meditate every day. Like everybody can. I'm like, I don't know, man. I like I'm busy, I got a lot of stuff going on, I'm traveling a lot, like things are things are kind of hectic. And he was like, Look, just can you meditate for 10 seconds? And I was like, Well, yeah, anybody can do that. He was like, Great. Meditate for 10 seconds every morning. And I was like, what's the point of that? He's like, Well, what's gonna happen is you're gonna get you're gonna sit down on the mat, you're gonna get all situated, you're gonna sit there, you're gonna count to 10, and then you're gonna be like, Well, this is stupid. I should stay here longer, right? Like I I came this far. And it's that's kind of the case with everything, right? It's like, you know, we I think what happens is we we set these in like massive long-term goals in our head. And then because it's so massive, it becomes extremely intimidating, right? So it's like, I want to have a six-pack by summer. That's really intimidating. That's a lot of meals that you have to like nail perfectly. That's a lot of workouts that you can't miss. That's a lot of sleep that you have to get, right? Like, what if you just start with why don't I put my shoes on and go to the gym? Just drive to the gym, right? Like, don't even you're not even obligated to do anything. Just put on your shoes and walk into a gym. That's all you have to do today. And then what happens is you get to the gym, you're like, well, I'm here. It'd be kind of stupid to leave, right? I might as well do a couple things.

Chris Allen 12:04

Might as well go in. You know, the thing that I love about the sort of micro steps um is most people won't even give that a shot because they think it's stupid.

SPEAKER_00 12:16

Yes.

Chris Allen 12:17

How can this help? And the people that tend to have, you know, remarkable change or change, you know, some major thing in their health, experience some sort of healing or whatever, whatever it is. There's these, they just decided to do the thing, right? And they they overcame this, this is dumb. Uh, I feel foolish kind of thing. And I think that that is that's like when you're when you're really thinking, if you really think about it, right? Feeling foolish is the thing that kind of trips us up. Right. And so I wonder, um, I wonder, I like that what you just said. Are there any anything about like tricking yourself? You got the you got the micro steps. Are there any other ways that you can sort of like use some psychology or something to sort of get yourself unstuck that's sort of beyond, you know, just the micro steps.

SPEAKER_00 13:09

Well, the so the fear of failure is a huge thing that holds people back, right? There's there's a certain amount of, you know, I don't want to look stupid, or I don't want to be, you know, the mo the the out-of-shape person at the gym. I, you know, I don't want to um be the one who proposes an idea in a meeting that like everybody laughs at, right? So there's there's a real uh fear of failure and embarrassment that holds a lot of people back as well. And and again, I think some of this is just um it it can be a perceptual thing. It can also be um it can also be an environmental thing. So um the perceptual piece is if you think about getting good at it, like if if everybody just stops and thinks about something that that they're very good at, and then you think about how many mistakes you had to make to get to being good at that thing, um, it's probably in the hundreds, if not thousands, right? If you're if you're excellent at something, like if you're actually like extremely good at something, it's probably in the thousands. And so one way to kind of frame it is that excellence is really just being able to learn from a hundred mistakes. And so the sooner you can start on those mistakes, the sooner you're gonna be good at something. Um you know, there is there's I've I've I've come across the idea, there's uh some startups, they they actually put somebody in charge, they'll call it head of failure. And that person's entire job is to simply run experiments and find uh find failures, right? So it's just like keep testing things, and most of them are gonna fail, and you're actually gonna be judged on how many failures you produce because we want you to keep testing abundantly. Um and so there's there's there's ways to kind of just incentivize yourself towards failure. The other piece is the environmental piece, right? Which is if you're we're if you're worried about social judgment, then the best thing you can do is simply find people who are who are in a similar situation and share your goal. Right. So it's like if you've never worked out a day in your life and you're really intimidated to go to the gym, don't go to a gym full of bodybuilders and like fitness models, right? Like go find a class that's for people who are out of shape and have never worked out before and make friends with them or find a friend who has similar aspirations and like go together and kind of you know make a joke out of it of like who's, you know, who can be the most embarrassing today? Like it's yeah, there's ways you can kind of play with your the the perceptual framing of of a lot of this stuff.

Chris Allen 15:34

You know, when people are thinking about success or these giant goals, how do you know you're sort of chasing the right goal?

SPEAKER_00 15:41

Oh, it's a good question. It's a really good question. Um I think there's kind of two pieces to this. I I I would actually say there's one. One is um knowing is kind of when should you give up on something. And then the other piece of this is um what are you optimizing for? And like how do you know if it's a good thing to optimize for or not? Uh on the first piece, you know, the the heuristic or the the kind of the mental tool that I use whenever I'm pursuing something is do I feel like the more I work towards something, the uh the more excited I get about it, or is it the more I work towards something, the less excited I get about it? And and what I for me, that excitement is kind of like a weather vein of um of like what how much this aligns with my values. So if I'm like really working towards something and every day that I work towards it, it I'm more miserable and I'm like starting to resent it. To me, that is that is something in my unconscious signaling to me like, hey, dude, this is not the thing, right? There's something off. It could be your motivation, it could be um like the way you're going about it, it could be like the the finish line you've set for yourself, but like something here is misaligned and you like should probably take a step back. Whereas like generally, if something's very aligned, like what you will find is that the hardest day is day one, and then from there it should get easier uh in terms of motivation. In terms of like, are you optimizing for the right thing? I think it's it's it's there's there's a simple game that um that I often play with myself um in and and ask other people is is it's kind of like what two-year-olds do is just ask why over and over again, right? So um I I used to call it with my coaching clients, I used to call it the why game, right? So it was it was like, you know, it's like oh I really, I really need to uh get another promotion. And you say, okay, cool, why? I'm like, well, I uh I need a pay raise and uh okay, why? And it's like, well, I gotta get out of debt. Okay, why? It's like, well, I I want to buy a car. And it's like, okay, why? And it's like, well, I need to, you know, I just feel like I feel like kind of a loser in the car I'm driving around. And it's like, okay, why? And it's like, well, well, I've got some insecurities. Okay, why? Right? You know, and pretty soon you're actually in a pretty deep place. And um and what you'll find is that there are uh what I would say is like a healthy motivation is that the why very quickly becomes circular. Um, so it could be something like, you know, it's like, uh, I want to get a promotion at work. Why? Well, I want to have more leverage and responsibility. Why? Because I love what I do and I I just want to do as much of it as I can. Okay, why? Because I love what I do and I want to do as much of it, you know. And it's like once you hit that loop, yeah, there you go. That's a sign of like, okay, you're probably in the right spot. But if you, if if your why game takes you down a very deep rabbit hole, and next thing you know, you're like talking about your mom's drinking problems and how your dad wasn't at your baseball game, then it's like, okay, you maybe, maybe set that goal aside and like, you know, go get some therapy.

Chris Allen 19:11

100%. You know, I I think one of the things, like my son, he's about to graduate, and this conversation is very much, you know, in there. He's like, well, you know, what should I do next? What would you say, you know, as sort of a closing thought, what would you say to the person that feels like they're they they don't want to waste their time and so they aren't doing anything.

SPEAKER_00 19:35

Sorry, that's that's like that sounds like a contradiction to me.

Chris Allen 19:39

I don't want I don't want to waste my time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Therefore, I'm not I'm stuck and can't make a decision.

SPEAKER_00 19:46

Got it. Um I think that's that that I would challenge that framing of the issue, right? It's because that that framing is based on the assumption that it's not worth doing something unless you're good at it and and that you're gonna do it for a long time, which is silly because there's I would back up further and I would say it's impossible for you to know what you're good at and what you're gonna do for a long time until you've tried many things, right? So if you only try one thing, you're just gonna assume, okay, this is my thing. But if you go out and try 10 or 20 things and you see you have different skill levels, different aptitudes, different levels of enjoyment of all the different things, then you're gonna make a much better informed decision about what you want to end up doing.

Chris Allen 20:33

Well, I love the way that you think about decision making and people making better choices and all that kind of stuff. Thanks for sitting down with us again and having that conversation. Absolutely. As I reflected on this conversation with Mark, here's the question that stuck with me. Are my daily behaviors actually aligned with the life that I say I want? Because it's easy to talk about goals or growth and change, but as Mark reminded us, our actions tend to reveal what we really value, not our intentions. And maybe real transformation doesn't begin with the massive breakthrough, but with the willingness to take one small step consistently enough for a new direction to take shape. So as you think about the decisions in front of you, ask yourself, what are you actually optimizing your life around? Thanks for listening to the Entrepreneur Studio. We'll be back next week with another full interview episode.