A responsible decision

• 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.

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.

• Appoint an executive sponsor to work with a project lead to frame important decisions for senior leaders to weigh in on;
• Break things down (with decision meetings at each stage), and connect them up.
• Focuses on debating the solution (instead of endlessly elaborating the problem) and gather the right people.
• Move faster without losing commitment: get comfortable living with imperfect data and being clear about what “good enough” looks like.

• Identify decisions that involve a cross-cutting group of leaders, and work with the stakeholders of each to agree on what the main steps in the process entail.
• Work through a set of real-life scenarios to pressure-test the system in collaboration with the people who will be running the process.
• Limit the number of decision-making bodies, and clarify for each its mandate, standing membership, roles etc.
• Create shared objectives, metrics, and collaboration targets.

Take each option in your decision and make two lists for each; on one side, you'll have all the benefits of an option and on the other, you'll have all the downsides. 

Try to give your list a sense of scale. This can help you think through all the positives and negatives of all your options, and help you visualize the generally best candidate.

Imagine your friend telling you the problem using only the most important information, and think about what you might say in return.

Imaging your own advice if you were counseling a friend on making the decision can help you understand what an outsider's perspective might be. 

Design your life like a choice architect:

• Encourage smarter decisions you want to do by making them more accessible.
• Add friction to habits you want to quit, making them less accessible, or remove the option to perform them completely.

“First, never underestimate the power of inertia. Second, that power can be harnessed.” 

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.

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. 

Many well-known problems of human reasoning disappear once you get a group of people together and let them talk about it.

It's a good way to see your ideas refuted or let stronger ideas win the day. Although there’s a risk of group think and conformity pressures, if you take a large and diverse enough group, you’re more likely to be exposed to the best reasoning, which will tend to win out over the majority opinion.

Many mediocre business people become successful just because they get things done.

Being smart or well-positioned or creative helps, but only second to progress - the ability to move from point A to point B to point C.

One of the root causes of analysis paralysis is that CEOs and founders built their organization to depend upon them. As a leader, your responsibility is not to make every decision yourself, but to create systems and a culture that empowers people to make educated decisions on their own.

Ask yourself how you can instil the same level of self-trust in those around you.

• Data can be easily made up to serve ulterior motives, which are far from the truth.
• Biased data finds its way out and is generally passed around as facts.
• Some critical thinking and skepticism are required before any data is accepted for making decisions.

People normally create a narrative based on their past and are sure that their predictions will match the way things will work out in the future. This is not usually the case, and it leads to wrong decisions.