Delphic Maxim 50: Act when you know

I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day

50. Act when you know

“Don’t act, think!” — Slavoj Žižek

One of the consequences of our rush to technology and mass media has been the acceleration of life itself. We constantly feel compelled to make decisions quickly, to rush into action. All the time we hear the cry in politics “we have to act now!”, as though rushed policy making is somehow a good thing — that failure to reflect won’t bite us again somewhere down the line. We reward decisiveness, we think that big life decisions should be settled early, and we also tend to lose our long-view because of this. When the ‘now’ dominates, then the small investments — life’s compound interest — become less appealing than the big, long, slog.

At work, I’ve been reflecting lately on Danny Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, because one of my clients will be interviewing him soon. In that book, Kahneman describes the way our instinctive, fast thinking suits most day-to-day decision making, but that the heuristics we use — the thought experiments and logic shortcuts — make us prone to biases and poor decision making when we need to slow down and think. This is where our slow thinking becomes crucial, but it’s also a deliberate process that requires effort — and we live, I think, in an age that bombards us with information, and pushes the throttle on our sense of urgency.

So we should stop, sometimes, and think before we act. One of the things that led to this series of blog posts about Delphic Maxims was a very long reading list I am wandering through with my friends. It’s a survey of the Western (and Southern, Eastern, Postmodern, Feminist) canon of literature and philosophy. There is no way you can do that quickly — I am particularly discovering this now as I pick my way through Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. These classics are unbelievably valuable, but they must be digested slowly, and the process of relating them to one another, of tracing the narrative thread that runs through it all, is a long and careful one. The payoff is huge — there’s that compound interest again — but it requires us to think.

Of course this maxim shouldn’t be an invitation to not act. Action doesn’t need to be deferred endlessly, replaced by unceasing rumination. That’s where this maxim takes Žižek’s injunction — “don’t act, think!” — and puts it nicely in context: act, but only when you have thought enough!

This might be the best way to adapt the lesson of this maxim for our hyper-connected world today. Rather than rush into important things, slow down your reactions and take time to respond. The best piece of advice I ever got about email etiquette was from a colleague when I worked in a political office. She said “never reply to an angry email straight away. Leave it 24 hours. Then both you and they will have cooler heads, and you won’t get into a pointless argument”. There have been so many times in my life where that advice has come in handy — and every time where I have ignored has always ended in frustration and a bad mood.

Wait until you know — do some thinking — and then act. The corollary of that is of course, that when you do know, and when you have done your thinking, make sure you act! The trap of procrastination — which I recently read is more emotional than it is actual structural barriers to productivity — is that we tick ourselves into deferring something that needs to be done. You know what needs to be done, so do it!

Think, then act. It doesn’t get much simpler.