How to Decide

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. If the answer is no, the decision passes the test, which means you can speed up. Repeat for a month and a week. The shorter the time period for which your answer is “no, it won’t much affect my happiness,” the more you can trade off accuracy in favor of saving time.

Regret (or fear of regret) can make you indecisive about nearly any choice.

Even though many decisions won’t have a significant impact on your long-term happiness, there is still a short-term cost of a bad result: regret.

Fear of regret costs time.

When a decision passes the Happiness Test, you can go fast. When an option repeats, you can go even faster, because getting another shot at the decision helps reduce what little cost there is of a bad outcome, as measured in regret, from a low-impact decision.

REPEATING OPTIONS When the same type of decision comes up over and over again, you get repeated chances to choose options, including options you may have rejected in the past.

Decisions that repeat also provide opportunities for choosing things you are less certain about, like a food you’ve never tried or a new TV show, because you don’t get penalized as heavily for taking those gambles. At little cost, you get information in return about your likes and dislikes, and you might find some surprises in there.

What’s the worst that can happen? If the outcome doesn’t go my way, am I worse off than I was before I made the decision?

freeroll isn’t so much about looking for situations with zero downside potential, but rather about looking for an asymmetry between the upside and downside potential of a decision.

In addition to impact obscuring the freeroll, the fear of failure or rejection can also be paralyzing, especially when there is a high probability that things won’t go your way.

You’re saving yourself from those short-lived feelings if the opportunity doesn’t pan out, but you’re costing yourself the chance for a meaningful, long-term boost to your well-being.

When asking yourself “What’s the worst that could happen?” make sure you follow up by examining the effects of making the same type of decision repeatedly. That’s how you recognize that a free donut is not a freeroll.

When a decision is hard, that means it’s easy

The very thing that slows you down—having multiple options that are very close in quality—is actually a signal that you can go fast, because this tells you that whichever option you choose, you can’t possibly be that wrong, since both options have similar upside and downside potential.

When a decision is hard, that means it’s easy The very thing that slows you down—having multiple options that are very close in quality—is actually a signal that you can go fast, because this tells you that whichever option you choose, you can’t possibly be that wrong, since both options have similar upside and downside potential.

Because we all live in the space between no information and perfect information, it’s not realistic to think that you will be able to discern which option is better.

You’re chasing an illusory certainty by taking all that extra time.

That would mean that you’re spending all that time to try to resolve a .2% difference between the two options.

THE ONLY-OPTION TEST For any options you’re considering, ask yourself, “If this were the only option I had, would I be happy with it?”

The Menu Strategy This strategy for choosing what to order from a menu can be broadly applied to decision-making in general. For any decision, spend your time sorting the world into stuff you like and stuff you don’t like. After that, go fast.