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These Six Questions Will Improve Your Decisions - Darius Foroux
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Improve decisions by focusing on the process
Most people assume that good decision making is choosing a course of action that leads to the desired outcome.
In reality, decision making is about how you end up with your decision, not what the decision leads to.
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Thought-provoking questions
Before making a decision, don't just ask the obvious questions like "what are my alternatives?" or "what are the consequences?"
Consider instead these questions:
- Why might my belief not be true?
- What other evidence might be out there?
- Are there similar areas I can look for to gauge whether similar beliefs to mine are true?
- What sources of information could I have missed?
- What reasons could someone else have to support a different belief?
- What other perspectives are there?
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Think about what you can’t know
Asking yourself critical questions forces you to think about what you can't know.
Critical questions direct you to friends, mentors, communities, books, courses, and even podcasts for insights that encourage an outside perspective.
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Open to other perspectives, but not gullible
As you become open to other perspectives, remember that other people also don't have all the answers. Adopt a stance of not believing everything instantly.
Keep looking for evidence and other perspectives. When you have collected enough information, make your decision.
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Common decision making pitfalls
- Analysis paralysis is very common. At some point, you get stuck in the process and can't make a decision. Don't let the fear of making the "right" decision paralyze you. There's no right or wrong outcome. Just outcomes.
- Extinction by instinct. It is the belief that instincts are effective in decision making. However, it leads to rash decisions.
- Information overload is when you ask too many people for their opinion. Stick to trustworthy sources and keep them to a minimum.
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The Munger Technique
*Just like compound interest multiples one’s savings, improving one’s mind daily, during the best hour of the day, multiplies one’s mental compounding interest.
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Investing In the Best Hours Of Your Day
- The morning hours are usually the best hours of your day, and what you do at that time has the power to change your life.
- Keep yourself away from distractions and just focus on your morning goals, like meditating, reading, writing or exercising.
- Checking e-mail, watching the news, or consuming useless (junk) content is the worst thing you can do in the morning.
The “Water Mindset”
Taking a cue from Bruce Lee’s famous quote ‘Be Water’, we must adopt a water mindset and adapt to our body and physiology: our best hour of the day could be any hour of the day, as long as it is according to you. Give yourself the best hour of the day.
All of us cannot wake up and join the 5 AM Club as our bodies are different and each morning isn’t the same.
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"The best measure of quality thinking is your ability to accurately predict the consequences of your ideas a..."
Milton Friedman
Think in Years, Not Days
Before jumping to a conclusion, think about the long-term consequences of your decision.
We may respect those able to fling themselves into a hard problem and make a quick choice with seemingly little thought, but making a meaningful decision needs to be done with care for the long-term effects.
Understand Decision Fatigue
It’s important to be aware of what state of mind you’re in before tackling a hard choice.
Decision fatigue happens when the mental energy required to weigh the tradeoffs of our decision becomes too much for us to handle.
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Making decisions
Decision making is critical for entrepreneurs. Every day, you have to set out on a course of action, choose tactics, evaluate results, and otherwise choose from arrays of options.
4 common mistakes that can trip you up
- Monumentalizing the Trivial. Place a limit on how long you're willing to spend addressing the issue. When the time ends, make your choice and move on.
- Dredging Sunk Costs. Estimate how much the decision would take in total to follow through. If the cost is higher than the benefit, change your decision.
- Drowning in Data. Identify less than 10 pieces of relevant data that will have a strong impact on your decision's outcome. Then forget everything else.
- Do-or-Die Mentality. Realize that every decision is temporary. Use an overall decision-making strategy that stretches over time, not that imagines each moment to be the most critical one for the business.