Do I want to pour Petrol or Water on this?
Do you want to pour petrol or water onto a situation?
It’s Friday afternoon. You’ve had a long week at work with a boss constantly micro-managing you, and giving the distinct impression that nothing you’ve done has been good enough.
You’re gathering your things and thinking about a cold drink with your partner at home to try and forget about what’s waiting for you on Monday, at least for a little while.
But you feel a tap on your shoulder. Without turning around, you know it’s that same boss with ‘just one more thing’.
Shane Parrish is a New York Times best-selling author of a book titled ‘Clear Thinking’. It’s been described as “an indispensible guide to making smarter decisions each day”.
And in it, he says:
“We don’t think of ordinary moments as decisions. No one taps us on the shoulder as we react to a comment by a coworker to tell us that we’re about to pour either gasoline or water onto this flame. Of course, if we know we were about to make the situation worse, we wouldn’t. No one tries to win the moment at the expense of the decade, and yet that is often how it goes.
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What Shane is saying is that if we’re able to step back and view a particular decision or choice rationally, we’re quite good at making the correct one. It would be difficult for anyone to argue that it would make sense for you to tell your boss to take his ‘one more thing’ and find a home for it somewhere dark where little sun might shine.
But so many decisions in life aren’t made with the benefit of space to think through things rationally. We’re emotional beings - for good reason1 - and that can mean that we pour gasoline on a situation, where water was clearly the better choice. We enflame something beyond our control because of a decision in the moment. And are forced to suffer the consequences.
The power to choose: petrol or water
We can’t just turn off our emotions. But when we create a rule, we can train ourselves to inject a space between our reaction - our emotion - and our response: petrol or water.
So, here’s a rule to consider bringing into your daily life:
When I feel a strong emotion in the moment, I will think of Petrol or Water.
For you, maybe that’ll mean conjuring an image, or a feeling, or a scene from a movie. But if you can start to associate strong emotions in the moment with a sense of choosing - petrol or water - you can start to create a space to choose your response.
Because when we face big, emotional confrontations, it rarely matters who started it, or what it’s really about; what matters is how you choose to move forward and towards a resolution.
And do you want that resolution to be a spark that was extinguished quickly, or a roaring inferno that we lost control of?
Now, just like we can’t just switch off emotions, we also can’t just choose a new way of being. Particularly in heated moments.
But that’s where the power of reflection comes in. If we reflect on the choices we made in a day, we can start to embed that learning into our behaviours in the future.
We’re all going to choose petrol sometimes. We’re not aiming for perfection. We’re aiming for a trend towards less petrol, more water over time.
So if we can pair our rule - Petrol or Water - with asking ourselves two questions at the end of each day, we can start to learn how to to better implement the rule.
And those two questions are:
In the choices I made today, what went well? (Water)
In the choices I made today, what could have gone better? (Petrol)
If we consistently ask ourselves these questions each day, we train our minds to associate our choices with the rule.
And once we have the rule, we have a way of making better decisions in the long term.