In this week's mini-episode, we discuss Hick's Law, a powerful psychology and design concept that explains how the availability of more options increases our decision-making time.
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Speaker 1: Hey everybody, before we get started this week, I have huge news. She actually did it. We're pleased to announce that Beatrice Jin, top-ranked women's competitor in North America and long-time BJJ Mental Models premium community member, has published her first ever course with us, exclusive to BJJ Mental Models. It's called Stop Being Nice. It's a three-part audio series designed to solve real mindset problems that regular folks experience in Jiu-Jitsu. If you struggle to be aggressive and competitive in Jiu-Jitsu, you'll find the solutions here. If you're already a BJJ Mental Models premium subscriber, you've already got access, and if you are not, good news, you can get it now and get your first week free, go to BJJmentalmodels.com and check it out today. Speaker 2: Hey, welcome to BJJ Mental Models. I'm Steve Quan. BJJ Mental Models is your guide to a conceptual and intelligent Jiu-Jitsu approach. And today, I want to talk about a really cool concept here called Hick's Law. Sometimes this is also called the Hick-Hyman Law. Hick's Law tells us that we can speed up reaction time by reducing the number of decisions available. This concept is really helpful in design. Think of software interfaces. If you reduce the number of buttons and options that appear on a user's screen, it's going to be easier for them to understand the options available and make a decision. Flip that around, and if you've ever seen a piece of software that has tons and tons of buttons on it and it takes forever just to figure out how you're supposed to use it, you know the frustration of having too many options. People sometimes think that more options are better, but more options make it harder for us to make a decision, and that means slower reaction time. In the world of design, this can be frustrating because it can result in a poor user experience. But in the world of Jiu-Jitsu, it can also be a problem because reaction time is so important in this game. The speed of your reactions in Jiu-Jitsu are often just as important, if not more important than whatever it is that you're actually planning to do. And so, we want to optimize our thinking to make decisions faster because we have so little time to make those decisions in the middle of a match. This comes up a lot when we try to build really complicated game plans. If you have a lot of ideas in your head, a lot of options that you are considering for a Jiu-Jitsu match, then in the moment is going to be harder for you to pick one of those. And that lost time could be the difference between success and failure. So Hick's Law aligns with a lot of the advice that wrestling and Jiu-Jitsu coaches will give, which is to simplify your thinking about the sport, simplify your game plan, have less going on in your head mid-match, and then you'll be able to make decisions faster. This might mean that rather than focusing on dozens of techniques for any individual situation, maybe you've only got one or two options. This is the reason why in Judo, despite the fact that there are 68 throws in the Judo canon, people generally focus on just a handful of them, and that's a concept that in Judo they call Tokui Waza. It's like a pro wrestler focusing on their favorite signature finisher move. And that's an example of Hick's Law, of streamlining the options available so that we can make better decisions faster. I bring all of this up because in Jiu-Jitsu, we sometimes feel like more is more, but in reality, less is often more. Jiu-Jitsu people have a tendency to hunt for new techniques. We love to study, we love to see what's going on in the current meta, and all of that is good, but if we try to do too many things at the same time, then Hick's Law comes into effect, and it can make it harder for us to make a decision in the moment. So, that's not to say we shouldn't learn a lot of things, but when it comes to game planning, we want to keep it simple, the fewer the options you have available, the easier it will be for you to make a quality decision. This is the kind of concept that we talk about at BJJ Mental Models. If you want more of this, go to BJJmentalmodels.com. All of the episodes of our full-length podcast, plus many episodes like this are completely free. I also tell people, you should sign up for our newsletter, that's free as well. And if you want to level up your Jiu-Jitsu game with us, check out BJJ Mental Models Premium. It's the world's largest library of Jiu-Jitsu audio courses on concepts, strategy, tactics, philosophy, mindset. These are the kinds of things that don't fit well into traditional Jiu-Jitsu instructionals, but they're really important, and often they don't get taught as frequently as they should. So, if you want to learn those with us, go to BJJmentalmodels.com. Thanks for listening, and I'll talk to you in the next episode.