Otherwise smart people can make terrible decisions. “I regard it as a criminal waste of time to go through the slow and painful ordeal of ascertaining things for one’s self if these same things have already been ascertained and made available by others.” - Thomas Edison While useful when deciding what to have for lunch, the pro-con list comes with a lot of blind spots. As a result, we often fall back to the pro-con list, where you list all the positive things that happen on one side and the negative things on the other trading them off. Yet most of us don’t have the right skills to think through these problems. Whether its who to trust, where to live, or whom to marry, these decisions reverberate for years. Yet some decisions are critical - they change our lives. The consequences of these decisions don’t matter. Most decisions, like where to grab a sandwich, are unimportant. How many decisions did you make today? How did you make these decisions? Is there a better way?
How many important decisions have you already had to make? With the benefit of hindsight, how well did you make them? Think about the state of your life, your career, your business, your major relationships - anything consequential to you. The mental models in your head are your cognitive skillset. Mental models shape how you think, how you approach problems, and how you identify the information that matters and ignore what doesn’t. So are probabilistic thinking, inversion, and entropy. Mental models are mental chunks of knowledge that represent a concept. You probably don’t know it but you already think in mental models. I could find the best teachers in the world, learn their tools and frameworks, and add them to my mental toolbox. Thanks to the internet, I was no longer limited to the best teachers in my organization or university. I read everything I could about making decisions and the tools I needed to develop. I watched them, asked them annoying questions, and tried to learn as much as I could from them. To fill my mental toolbox, I looked around my organization and found some mentors. There are a lot of kinds of stupid, too.” - JeFF Bezos “The older I get the more I realize how many kinds of smart there are. A hammer wasn’t enough, I wanted more tools. In my world, a poor decision could cost lives, impact my country, or even start a war. While a hammer can often get the job done eventually, it comes with a cost. No matter the job, we pull out our hammer and attempt to make it work. To a man with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Most of us operate like a carpenter with only a hammer.
#Sound decisions series
What distinguishes consistently good decision-makers from poor ones is a series of diverse mental frameworks and tools (as well as relevant specific information). There is no class called “decision making.” Making better decisions isn’t one skill but rather a series of tools and frameworks. I only knew I had an obligation to make the best decisions I could.
#Sound decisions how to
I had no idea how to make smart decisions. Just out of school, I found that my decisions affected not only my employees but their families. I came from a world of 1s and 0s, not people, families, and interpersonal dynamics.
My computer science degree lost its value after a few promotions. Two weeks later, the world would never be the same. I started working at an intelligence agency on August 28, 2001. Intelligent Preparation: The World Is Multidisciplinary.Your Mind is a Pattern Matching Machine.The decision-making principles in this article are both practical and time-tested. Yet no one really teaches us what it means to make consistently high-quality decisions. How to Make Smart Decisions Without Getting Luckyįew things will change your trajectory in life or business as much as learning to make effective decisions.
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