You can’t change the past.

I sometimes joke with my wife about how great it is that so many devices and apps have a mute button, and wouldn’t it be nice if certain people had that button. She generally responds that, if I’d like to marry my smartphone, I should feel free to do so. I also make extensive use of the undo function in the apps I work with, and have often wished life had that feature as well.

But it doesn’t. Newsflash – we can’t change the past, much as we would like to. As a qualitative researcher, I have often found the ‘time machine question’ to be useful. Asking participants what they would do if they could turn back time brings up all sorts of interesting topics: decision-making, regrets, fears and hopes to name a few. But, while it’s worthwhile to dwell on these questions in the context of qualitative research, it’s not a great way to live your life.

Thinking about the past is entirely human. It can be productive, particularly if your intention is to learn and improve. (A couple of years ago I wrote a post on learning from past mistakes.) It’s no accident that so much popular culture centers around the theme of time travel and changing the past. Just ask Marty McFly.

But, when rehashing the past, it’s easy to lapse into regret and recrimination. Psychotherapists understand that discussing regrets and past mistakes with patients can be risky, with the possibility of ‘retraumatizing’ patients if the memories being discussed are particularly distressing. This is why the ancient stoic philosophers exhorted their followers to let go of their disappointments and focus on the present.

So, what are some keys to looking at the past productively?

Own your failures, maybe even celebrate them. I’ve always believed that, if you never experience failure, you’re not trying hard enough.

Don’t conflate decisions with outcomes. Remember that a good decision doesn’t guarantee a good result. What’s more, sometimes you get lucky and a bad decision works out anyway. If you took a smart risk, give yourself credit for that, regardless of the results.

Be honest about what could, and could not, have been foreseen. We must expect the unexpected. Think about contingency planning – did you make sufficient allowances for the unpredictable?

Focus on what you can learn, rather than how you messed up. The point of looking back is to learn and grow, not to beat yourself up.

Know when it’s time to stop analyzing and move on. There comes a point when reflection must give way to action.

I’m not saying that any of this is easy, but it is possible. And the more you do this, the better you’ll get at it.

When you continually rehash, or even obsess over, the past, you’re not doing anything productive, you’re just wasting time and imprisoning yourself in a cycle of regret and self-blame. So, make peace with the past. Make peace with your mistakes. They have made you who and what you are today.

Old habits die hard, no matter who you are.

ere is a case in point. Recently, I conducted qualitative research interviews regarding pharmaceutical websites. One participant was a RN who was also the office manager for a medical practice. She was quite young (at least by my standards) – in her late 20s.

Despite being extremely intelligent, she had difficulty navigating around and finding information on drug manufacturers’ websites. When we discussed why this was such a challenge, she revealed that manufacturers’ websites were not where she sought information. She had other online resources that she used, and those resources were organized differently. She pondered, “I guess I’m just set in my ways.”

She saw an unwillingness to depart from familiar habits as a trait of ‘older’ people. However, she admitted to being exactly that way herself. “I guess there’s a cranky, unteachable old person inside all of us,” she said.”

Being crotchety and incorrigible isn’t just for the old. Everybody gets set in their ways, and for good reasons. Habits are automatic behaviors that reduce cognitive load. They simplify tasks and provide efficiencies. Once you’ve established a habitual way of doing something, you don’t have to think about it.

The key to success is knowing when to stick with what works, and when to depart from that and embrace the new. It’s the difference between ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ and ‘if it ain’t broke, break it.’

Habits offer important benefits:

• They ease mental burden. Habits obviate the need to make decisions, meaning you’re not working as hard between the ears.

• They lead to predictable results. This is essential to efficiency and productivity.

• They provide discipline. This creates structure and reduces procrastination.

However, habits also have downsides:

• They make change difficult. Sometimes we must adapt to new or complex situations. However, habits can foster inflexibility.

• They can breed boredom and complacency. This can lead to reduced motivation and engagement.

• They can reinforce negative behavior patterns. When a habit is not helping you, perhaps even making a situation worse, it can be hard to break that pattern.

Ultimately habits – like rules – are surrogates for thought. Sometimes this is helpful, sometimes not. Long term success requires evolving over time as circumstances change. When the ground shifts, you need to start thinking. This requires adaptability and intentionality – qualities engrained habits don’t promote.

It’s also important to remember that habits might be hard to break because they can define our sense of identity. As Aristotle once wrote, “we are what we repeatedly do.” When a pattern of behavior becomes closely linked to your self-image, changing that pattern might feel like self-betrayal.

So, while it’s valuable to get in the habit of establishing habits, it’s also worthwhile to get in the habit of breaking habits. Rigidity and complacency are very human traits. Always be on the lookout for them.

Happy New Year to all! I’m guessing that many of you have made some New Year’s resolutions.

As for me, I have resolved for the new year to focus, to the greatest extent possible, on things I can actually control. I also plan to devote as little attention as I can to things that are beyond my control. This is hardly a new idea – the principle goes back at least as far as ancient Greece. As the stoic philosopher Epictetus once wrote, “Some things are up to us, and some things are not.” He also pointed out that trying to control the uncontrollable is inconsistent with living in harmony alongside nature.

While focusing on what you can control sounds great, it’s more easily said than done. But I’m going to give it my best shot. This resolution has gotten me thinking about what is truly within my control, and I’ve come to realize that this is more complicated than I had originally thought.

For one thing, in my field of qualitative research, it’s well accepted that it is unwise to exert too much control over research conversations and interviews. Only by ceding control can we allow conversations to go in unexpected directions and yield creativity and insight that would otherwise be inaccessible. So, even if you can control something, maybe you shouldn’t.

There are also implications for marketing strategy. For instance, you can’t control how consumers behave and perceive your brand. However, you usually can control the brand experience, which can provide some indirect control over behaviors and perceptions. This illustrates the principle elucidated by the Roman philosopher Seneca that, while we can control our own actions and decisions, we generally can’t control outcomes.

So, what makes the question of what you can control so complex? Here are some factors that I think contribute to this:

• Control is not a binary thing; it’s one end of a continuum (the other end being chaos). While some elements of a situation are clearly controllable, and others clearly aren’t, many fall into a gray area. You might not be able to ‘control’ something, but you can influence it. This is particularly true in collaborative situations, when success depends on both individual and collective effort.

• Overly stressing control can hinder creativity. Making a situation too controlled makes it less likely that the unexpected will happen. Remember – the world is a beautifully messy place; my last newsletter touches on the idea of embracing the uncontrollable.

• Emotions can get in the way – ceding control might not feel good.

• So can moral values – giving up control might even feel wrong.

Let’s return to my New Year’s resolution. While there are countless ‘controllable’ things to choose from, I’ve decided to focus on just three in 2025:

• How much time I devote to the people I care about.

• My willingness to change my opinion about something.

• How much effort I make to discover new ideas and build new skills.

What are your new year’s resolutions? Do you even have any? Does this whole ‘control’ thing figure into them? Please email me back and let me know. I’d love to know your hopes and intentions for 2025.

The real world is complicated and messy. And that’s what’s great about it.

I love Edward Hopper’s works. They carry a sense of simplicity and longing that have always resonated with me.
Hopper’s paintings are often described as melancholy, a quality that stems from their sparseness of composition and the isolation of the characters depicted. But, to me, this also illustrates the opposite idea: that much of the joy and exuberance of life comes from human relationships and the fact that the world is complicated and messy.

Take a look at the image at the top of this newsletter. Nighthawks is probably Hopper’s most famous work. It’s a beautiful composition of stillness, stark lighting and characters lost in their own thoughts. And, I don’t know about you, but that’s probably the neatest, calmest diner I’ve ever seen. Think about what a real diner would be like: signs all over the walls (try our corned beef hash!), plates of food and cups of coffee in constant motion, people engaged in animated conversation and waitresses calling everybody “hon.” And that’s why I love diners.

So, here’s an important thing to remember this time of year—if you try to be too perfect, if you try to make everything just so, you’re likely to squeeze all the life out of what’s going on. The holidays are often a fraught time of year, and it doesn’t help to beat yourself up over everything not being as neat and organized as it ‘should’ be. Allow yourself to enjoy the hullabaloo that generally accompanies the holidays.

I wrote a year-end piece a few years ago about what I call ‘The Dirty Harry Principle.’ It’s about a closely related idea: knowing your limitations, being comfortable with them, and not needing to be perfect all the time, particularly this time of year. It’s a message worth a few minutes of your time.

There’s an important implication here for my field of qualitative research: don’t try to make conversations and research stimuli overly neat and orderly. Let them be kind of messy to create energy and simulate reality. For example, overly simple and clean renderings of a retail shelf set may produce misleading results because actual retail environments are so cluttered and untidy. Also, real-world conversations generally don’t involve everybody taking their turn to speak—they can be pretty chaotic. While quantitative research needs to be controlled and structured in order to generate representative and projectable data, qual doesn’t need to do that. So let the turmoil work for you.

My previous newsletter was about how decision making in the real world tends to be messy, impulsive and irrational. Decision making isn’t the only human phenomenon that’s kind of wild. We’re just a crazy species. So embrace that old adage:  God bless this mess.

So, did you enjoy the recent election and the campaign that preceded it? I know I did (not!).

But I can’t deny it was interesting. If nothing else, we got to see decision making in all its pathological glory.
As a qualitative researcher, a lot of my work involves decision making. Clients often need to understand how people choose among alternatives. For instance, understanding how taxpayers choose among tax prep approaches can help a provider of tax tools design an appropriate range of service offerings.

So, I know a thing or two about decision making. One thing I know is how messy it can be.

Decision making is thought of as a process of choosing among options based on analysis and reasoning. Occasionally, that’s actually what it is. It would be nice to think that we consider all available information and make rational judgements. However, it’s usually the other way around.

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s research shows that people tend to form beliefs and make decisions quickly and impulsively, frequently based on intuitive moral judgments. Afterwards, they back into a rationalization. This seems to be particularly the case when it comes to politics, which has become little more than a public morality play.

During political campaigns, voters of all persuasions form quick impressions of candidates and issues based on moral considerations – their intuitive sense of right and wrong – and vote accordingly. Questions to these voters about their decisions receive rational, after-the-fact explanations. But these justifications are unreliable, as they rarely get to the moral motivations behind these decisions.

So, if you’re struggling to understand why people vote as they do, realize that their decisions are probably based on different moral priorities than yours. Right now, the news media is putting out pat explanations for why voters acted as they did in the recent election. Be skeptical – the truth is far less tidy.

Decision making in the real world is messy. It isn’t what we’d like to think it is, and it doesn’t work the way we’d like to think it does. It’s not a neat, linear process that always yields good choices. And don’t think that this applies to everyone but you – you’re no more rational than anybody else.

So, why do we make decisions so impulsively? Look no further than evolution. The world in which we evolved was much simpler than our current one. The decisions we faced were also simpler, and being able to make decisions quickly was essential. This pattern of rapid decision making – which served us so well in ancient times – doesn’t work well in our modern and increasingly complicated environment.

So, when you face decisions, remember that your own evolved brain may not be perfectly suited to the task. Be skeptical of your initial instincts and force yourself to think things through. You might find yourself making better choices.