How to Decide

you can physically prevent yourself from making poor decisions.

He gives you a good reason to make a choice that causes you to lose a little bit on the path to reaching your goal. Then he piles up a lot of those decisions, killing your plans slowly, without allowing you to be aware that you are taking yourself down.

When your reaction to a bad outcome can make things worse

Another likely obstacle to achieving a goal is the way you react to a bad outcome.

Right after a bad outcome, especially one due to something outside your control, you can become emotionally compromised.

TILT When a bad outcome causes you to be in an emotionally hot state that compromises the quality of your decision-making.

It changes your frame from “I can’t believe this happened to me” to “This happened but I knew it was a possibility.” When

the emotional parts of your brain inhibit the parts of your brain responsible for rational thinking.

When you consider how you might respond to negative outcomes in advance of those things happening, you’re likely to think more rationally.

you can learn to recognize the signs that you’re on tilt so you can identify and address it more quickly.

When you recognize the signs of tilt, ask yourself, “In a week (or a month, or a year), am I going to be happy with any decisions I make right now?”

Third, you can precommit to certain actions that you’ll take (or refrain from taking) in the wake of bad outcomes.

unexpectedly good outcomes also have the potential for compromising your decision-making.

A hedge reduces the impact of bad luck when it occurs. A hedge has a cost.

When you’re considering a hedge, you’re naturally focused on weighing the cost of the hedge against the benefit of reducing the impact of a bad outcome. But you should also think in advance about how you’ll feel if you don’t use the hedge.

We are pretty good at setting positive goals for ourselves. Where we fall flat is at executing the things we need to do to achieve them. The gap between the things we know we should do and the decisions we later make is known as the behavior gap. The message of the power of

power of positive thinking is that you’ll succeed if you imagine yourself succeeding.

Negative thinking helps you identify things that might get in your way so you can identify ways to reach your destination more efficiently.

Thinking about how things can go wrong is known as mental contrasting.

mental time travel, picturing yourself in the future having failed to achieve a goal, and then looking back at what got you to that outcome.