Rory Sutherland made a sharp observation about why so many smart people struggle with real life decisions. On Andrew Gold’s Heretics podcast, he blamed part of it on our education system. From school exams to intelligence tests, we’re trained on problems that have one clear right answer and all the information neatly provided (like the classic “two buses leave the station” math problem). But real-world choices — who to marry, where to live, what career to pursue, even what sofa to buy — are nothing like that. Information is incomplete, messy, sometimes deliberately misleading, and there’s rarely a single “optimal” answer. Some of the smartest people he knows (including his astrophysicist brother) get paralyzed in places like IKEA because there’s no algorithm to optimize the decision. This matters because we’re educating people to excel at artificial problems while leaving them unprepared for the ambiguous, high-stakes decisions that actually shape their lives. This one landed hard. I’ve caught myself overthinking simple choices because I was waiting for that perfect, single right answer that school trained me to look for. Real life is rarely that clean. This one landed hard. I’ve caught myself overthinking simple choices because I was waiting for that perfect, single right answer that school trained me to look for. Real life is rarely that clean. What’s a decision you’ve struggled with because there was no clear “right” answer?