How to Decide

The only thing you have control over that can influence the way your life turns out is the quality of your decisions.

There is an elegant simplicity to performing tasks if you have the right tool for the right job.

You can run a red light and get through the intersection unscathed. You can go through a green light and get in an accident. This means that working backward from the quality of a single outcome to figure out whether a decision was good or bad is going to lead to some poor conclusions. Resulting can make you think that running red lights is a good idea.

RESULTING A mental shortcut in which we use the quality of an outcome to figure out the quality of a decision.

the quality of the result filters how we view the decision, even when we have identical details about the decision process,

The quality of the outcome casts a shadow over our ability to see the quality of the decision

We want outcome quality to align with decision quality. We want the world to make sense in this way, to be less random than it is. In trying to get this alignment, we lose sight of the fact that for most decisions, there are lots of ways things could turn out.

sometimes we draw a connection between outcome quality and decision quality that is too tight.

The decision you make determines which set of outcomes are possible and how likely each of those outcomes is.

The decision you make determines which set of outcomes are possible and how likely each of those outcomes is. But it doesn’t determine which of that set of outcomes will actually happen.

Luck exerts its influence between your decision and which of the possible paths you end up on. It is the element you have no control over that determines which of the possible outcomes you actually observe in the short run.

Being a better decision-maker means being a better predictor of the set of possible futures.

Developing the discipline to separate the quality of the result from the quality of the decision can help you to figure out which decisions are worth repeating and which aren’t.

It’s not easy to be willing to give up the credit that comes from feeling like you made good things happen, but it is worth it in the long run.

Even when you make a good decision, that doesn’t mean that it was the best decision. In fact, it rarely is.

Resulting is the tendency to look at whether a result was good or bad to figure out whether a decision was good or bad.

Luck is what intervenes between your decision and the actual outcome. Resulting diminishes your view of the role of luck.

the goal is to try to choose the option that will lead to the most favorable range of outcomes.

Making better decisions starts with learning from experience. Resulting interferes with that learning, causing you to repeat some low-quality decisions and stop making some high-quality decisions.

Even if good decisions preceded a good outcome, can you identify some ways the decision could have been better?