How to Decide

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

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.

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.

Looking back from an imagined future at the route that got you there is called prospective hindsight.

A premortem combines prospective hindsight with mental contrasting.

Decision Exploration Table, the first thing to ask is whether you should modify your goal or change your decision.

This desire for people to agree with what other people are saying is so strong that you can even get people to express agreement with a belief that’s objectively, clearly incorrect.

You’ve probably also figured out that the exciting stuff happens where those maps diverge. That’s where you find corrective information and the stuff you don’t know. Exploring that divergence allows you to get closer to what’s objectively true.

The objective truth lies somewhere between the two beliefs.

a little bit of pain in exchange for higher-quality decisions for the rest of your life.

you benefit from the exchange as well because the act of explaining your belief and conveying it to someone else will improve how well you understand it.

even if their belief doesn’t change at all upon hearing yours, they still may not tell you their true opinion.

when you tell someone what you think before hearing what they think, you can cause their opinion to bend toward yours,

Don’t let them know what you think before you find out what they think.

keeping the outcome of a decision to yourself is harder to execute than you might think because, intuitively, we all feel that how the decision turned out is relevant information for the other person to know.

Get their opinion prior to telling them the method you chose.