How to Decide

Ask yourself, if a coworker or friend or family member were to have this problem, how would you view their problem?

Ask yourself, if a coworker or friend or family member were to have this problem, how would you view their problem? How might your perspective differ from theirs? What advice might you give them? What kind of solutions would you offer?

decision-making led you to where you are. You can’t change luck. You can only change your decisions. The outside view gets you to focus on what you can change.

You can’t change luck. You can only change your decisions. The outside view gets you to focus on what you can change.

When it comes to success or failure, it can be painful to explore the outside view, especially when the inside view feels so good. But it is worth the discomfort.

Motivated reasoning is the tendency to process information to get a conclusion we want rather than to discover what is true.

Accuracy lives at the intersection between the inside view and the outside view.

being smart can make it worse because smart people have more confidence in the truth of their beliefs and can spin better narratives to sway other people (and themselves) toward their point of view.

These tiny expenditures mount up over time until you have spent seven workweeks a year deciding what to eat, watch, and wear.

The ability to figure out when you can decide faster (and when you need to slow down) is a crucial decision skill to develop.

The faster you decide, the more you sacrifice accuracy.

THE TIME-ACCURACY TRADE-OFF Increasing accuracy costs time. Saving time costs accuracy.

You don’t want to waste too much time and you don’t want to sacrifice too much accuracy.

The key to achieving the right time-accuracy balance is figuring out what the penalty is for making a lower-quality decision than you would have if you had taken more time.

The smaller the penalty, the faster you can go. The bigger the penalty, the more time you should take on a decision. The smaller the impact of a poor outcome, the faster you can go. The bigger the impact, the more time you should take.

Regardless of whether your food is good or bad, it is unlikely to have any significant effect on your happiness in the long run.

Regardless of whether your food is good or bad, it is unlikely to have any significant effect on your happiness in the long run. The same is also true if you watch the beginning of a bad movie on Netflix or wear

Regardless of whether your food is good or bad, it is unlikely to have any significant effect on your happiness in the long run. The same is also true if you watch the beginning of a bad movie on Netflix or wear pants that turn out to be uncomfortable.

choosing what to eat, watch, or wear are types of decisions that are low impact.

THE HAPPINESS TEST Ask yourself if the outcome of your decision, good or bad, will likely have a significant effect on your happiness in a year.