The decision is based on a prediction, right?

Should I do this, is because I'm predicting that this will be great, or this, which will be great, which will be great, or I don't know, and so on.

When you can't predict, it doesn't matter.

And if it doesn't matter, then life actually becomes easy.

So my bottom line, rather than waste your time being stressed over making the right decision, make the decision right, randomly choose.

Now, you can randomly choose if you want an Almond Joy or a Snickers, nobody's gonna care, right?

But it's the exact, this is the hard part to swallow, it's the exact same thing about getting an abortion or not, getting married or not, taking the job or not.

Doesn't matter whether the decision is big or small, you can't know.

That's a very confronting idea.

Yeah, well, I mean, you can only live one life.

If there were some magical way that I could live a life as somebody who's had three kids, and live a life as somebody who has one kid and somebody who hasn't had kids, maybe I can make a comparison.

But you don't have that available to you.

So I say to my students, so let's say, should you go to Harvard or should you go to Yale?

So they made a decision to go to Harvard.

So let's say it's terrible, you know, if they screw up royally.

And they say, oh, I wish I had gone to Yale.

There's no way of knowing that Yale wouldn't have been worse, better, the same.

And that's why regret is so mindless.

Because the choice you didn't take, you're presuming, would have been better.

And, you know, there's no evidence for that.

I'm almost embarrassed to tell you, I had virtually never experienced stress.

Wow.

Yeah, I mean, I've had some big things happen in my life.

You know, a major fire that destroyed 80% of what I owned.

My mother died when she was young.

You know, these sorts of things.

But when the house went up in smoke, and I called the insurance agent, came the next day, and he said to me, in his 25 years on the job, this was the first time that the damage was worse than the call.

Oh my God, oh my God, is what most people say.

I can't, oh, and it's nothing, right?

Here, it was a lot.

But my feeling was, I had already lost the stuff.

Throwing my sanity away wasn't going to get it back.

And I also felt, I'm not so attached to things.

I love nice things, but I don't need them.

You know, so, and those things were all part of my past.

As long as you have a rich present, you don't need the mementos from the past.

I didn't care really about anything that I lost in the fire, except that in a short time from the date of the fire, I had to give a large lecture class, and my notes were destroyed.

And so what am I going to do, what am I going to do?

So what I ended up doing was calling a student who took the class the year before, and I borrowed her notes, like a telephone game.

And because they were somebody else's notes, even though they were basically copying down from what I had said, I involved myself, I engaged myself in the preparation for each lecture in a way that I hadn't done in a while.

You know, the problem, PowerPoint slides are wonderful, but once you have it, it's sort of hard to change your thinking about all of it.

So here, since I didn't have any of the slides, everything was new, and I think it was the best class that I had taught.