Improve Your Decisions

I find the topic of decisions making to be a fascinating one.

In the past few years, I wrote about it several times and this is the post I keep returning as the ‘checklist’.

However, it’s great to have quick and simple rules that you can use.

Three rules to improve your decisions (that I ‘borrowed’ from @naval ):

• If you can’t decide, the answer is no – It might be a bit tricky in cases where you don’t have a Yes/No decision. However, the idea (IMHO) is that you should have a hunch on what will be the right path and if you can’t feel it, try to base the decision on the best data you can find.

• If two equally difficult paths, choose the one more painful in the short term (pain avoidance is creating an illusion of equality) – This is a clever one, as it’s pointing you in the direction of
  
  ‘Easy choices → Hard life. Hard choices → Easy life’.
  
  I’m not sure, this rule will be valid in all cases, but even if it’s holding for 80% it’s a good one to remember.

• Choose the path that leaves you calmer in the long term – Smart way to validate which is the better decision for a given challenge.

Also, it’s good to remember that

“It’s extremely hard to make good decisions in a poor environment.”

So do your best to improve the environment (e.g. company, friends) before taking important decisions.

The original tweet:

Decisions:

• If you can’t decide, the answer is no.

• If two equally difficult paths, choose the one more painful in the short term (pain avoidance is creating an illusion of equality).

• Choose the path that leaves you more equanimous in the long term.

— Naval (@naval ) July 13, 2018

Have a great weekend.