Hercules at the Crossroads

The image of Hercules at the crossroads, choosing between a life of virtue and a life of vice, is one of the most famous of the Greek parables.

Faced with the two forces personified in the form of two women, Hercules chose virtue after each one explained what their paths held. It is not clear what line of thought led to Hercules’ decision, but if I had to guess, he asked himself some form of the following question:

“Through which path can I live a life of greatness?”

Through the lens of such a clear, binary question, the answer becomes clear. While vice and virtue may not appear to us personified and in a one off fashion like in the story of Hercules, we are instead placed on this crossroad daily, even though we may not always realize it.

Asking ourselves the right crossroad questions can help us override impulse and force us to consider only the true and relevant nature of our potential decisions.

Crossroad Questions

When we are tasked with some important decision, we should ignore any immediate impulse or motivations we may feel. Instead of rushing for an answer, we should instead ask ourselves the right questions in order to elicit sincere answers that will best serve us and our goals. Asking ourselves quality questions elicits useful answers.

But likewise, bad questions produce ambiguity and bad answers. As the computer science saying goes: garbage in, garbage out (GIGO). Our answers can only be as good as the questions we ask.

A good crossroad question must satisfy the 3 following conditions: specificity, relevant time horizon, and effectiveness. In order to illustrate these three conditions, we’ll use a common challenge: weight loss.

Specificity

The hurdle to overcome in weight loss is the impulse to eat more. While any attempt at a diet should be gradual and sustainable, whenever an individual is in a caloric deficit (eating less calories than you are burning), there will be a craving to eat more. In such a situation, you can ask yourself: What am I willing to sacrifice to achieve my goal?

That is all well and good as a thought, but useless in practice. We need to be as specific as possible to avoid rationalizations. This questions has too many potential answers.

“I can have this cookie and just increase how many calories I burn.”

This will create a habit of overeating and then additional exercise, leading to an unsustainable exercise routine.

“I’ll just cut out the calories from my next meal.”

This leads to further cravings when the next meal comes, creating even more craving and binge eating.

Instead, a more specific question that satisfies all conditions is: How will these extra 500 calories make me feel tomorrow? How about in a week? Tomorrow, you will wake up bloated and the scale will read heavier than expected. In a week, you will be disappointed with yourself when you miss your weekly weight goal. The stakes are now clear. The decision now depends on the context of the indulgence, and how much the goal matters to you.

Time Horizon

Depending on the impulse, the time horizon will need to shrink or expand. Everything, of course, is contextual. 500 calories do not matter in the light of a year. So if you are at your friend’s wedding, a once a year event (if that often), go ahead and indulge without thinking too much about the immediate consequences. This is why in the example above, I framed the question in the span of a day and week. Those 500 calories have a more pronounced effect in a short amount of time.

It is when the focus switches to more permanent matters, like career choices or whether or not you want to marry someone, that you must expand your time horizon. When someone is asking whether you want to spend the rest of your life with them, suddenly no time horizon you can think in seems too long.

Effectiveness

To know what questions will be effective, we need to know what virtues we value the most. Personally, I value discipline, so I often ask myself “what will this decision say about my discipline?”. When I imagine myself following through with a decision that shows a lack of discipline on my behalf, I get chills. I won’t go through with it. Find the values that make you shudder and cringe when you imagine yourself violating them, and exploit those feelings in your personal questions.

Answer Authentically

While good crossroad questions form the bedrock of good decision making, they are rendered useless until we have the ability to answer them authentically. Soon, I’ll explain how through practices like journaling, mindfulness, and setting goals or objectives for the future, we can become more self aware. That way, we can give honest answers to our crossroad questions.