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Making Smart Choices: 8 Keys to Making Effective Decisions
Create imaginative alternatives
Your decision can be no better than your best alternative.
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Key Ideas
Work on the right decision
The way you frame your decision at the outset can make all the difference.
State your decision problems carefully, acknowledge their complexity and avoid unwarranted assumptions and option-limiting prejudices.
Specify your objectives
A decision is a means to an end. Ask yourself what you most want to accomplish and which of your interests, values, concerns, fears, and aspirations are most relevant to achieving your goal.
Decisions with multiple objectives cannot be resolved by focusing on any one objective.
Understand the consequences
Assessing frankly the consequences of each alternative will help you to identify those that best meet your objectives—all your objectives.
Grapple with your tradeoffs
Because objectives frequently conflict with one another, you’ll need to strike a balance. Some of this must sometimes be sacrifices in favor of some of that.
Your risk tolerance
When decisions involve uncertainties, the desired consequence may not be the one that actually results. A much-deliberated bone marrow transplant may or may not halt cancer.
Consider linked decisions
What you decide today could influence your choices tomorrow, and your goals for tomorrow should influence your choices today. Thus many important decisions are linked over time.
SIMILAR ARTICLES & IDEAS:
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Our emotions are short-term biased
Our emotions are obsessed with the present moment because it’s difficult to look past our immediate fears and anxieties. And this prevents good decision-making.
The sweet spot in de...
“Risky” behavior you should consider
- Propose “moonshot” ideas, knowing that 90% of them will get shot down, but that if one of them gets accepted, it will be a huge boost to your career.
- Be excessively bold in your dating life, stating exactly who and what you want.
- Buy difficult books expecting that most of them won’t be useful to you, but also that, occasionally, one will completely change your life.
- Say yes to every invitation knowing that most of the events/people will be boring, but that occasionally you’ll meet someone really interesting.
Optimizing life for fewer regrets
Most of us are afraid of messing thing up. But we rarely ask, “Would I regret that failure?” If the answer is “no,” then that is absolutely a risk you should pursue.
Sometimes, the right decision becomes crystal clear when put into these terms.
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Key Ideas
Do some math
You make one decision, wait, make a second decision, and then make a compromise between the two.
Averaging the two judgments tends to outperform trying to identify the better of the tw...
Pair a good decision with a bad one
If you only allow yourself your vice while you’re simultaneously being virtuous, you’ll spend more time doing things that are good for you and less time doing the “bad” things.
The researchers call this “pre-bundling” and say it allows people to couple instantly gratifying activities (such as watching trashy TV) with a behavior that’s beneficial in the long term but requires willpower (like working out).
Take things one at a time
Next time you’re faced with a problem with many possible answers, pinpoint your end goals and then come up with a solution for each.
This is likely to lead to the generation of a diverse set of options covering multiple categories of solutions.
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Key Ideas
The rational manner
When faced with a difficult dilemma, we should carefully assess our options and spend a few moments consciously deliberating the information. Then, we should choose the best fit for our preferences...
The emotional system
This would suggest that the unconscious is better suited for difficult cognitive tasks than the conscious brain, that the very thought process we've long disregarded as irrational and impulsive might actually be "smarter" than reasoned deliberation.
How emotional decision-making works
Thinking in a rational manner is more effective when there are limited pieces of information. However, those focused on feelings prove far better in complex conditions.
The advantages of emotional decision-making could be undone by a subsequent bout of deliberation, which suggests that we shouldn't doubt a particularly strong instinct, at least when considering lots of information.
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