When the payoff isn’t clear

A $10 notebook, the kind you use for journaling, caught my eye. I went back and forth on it for days. I treated the purchase like it needed a formal decision memo.

And at the grocery store, I grabbed a container of watermelon. Also about $10. I didn’t really think about it until I got home.

Why did I agonize over one decision and not the other? It wasn’t price: They cost about the same.

It might be the difference between a purchase and a bet.

The watermelon’s value was obvious before I picked it up: I like watermelon. I’d rather have watermelon than $10. Done.

But the notebook’s value was unknown. It depended on whether a new way of capturing notes would actually change how I think. I wasn’t really buying a notebook but trying to predict whether I’d actually use one.

The agony was about the uncertainty of the payoff, not the price.