How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

Decisions where the cost to quit is manageable also give you an opportunity to gather information through innovation and experimentation. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Virgin Group founder Richard Branson include the concept of a “two-way-door” decision in their decision process. A two-way-door decision is, simply put, a decision where the cost to

You can identify low-impact decisions with the Happiness Test, asking yourself if how your decision turns out will likely have an effect on your happiness in a week, a month, or a year. If the type of thing you are deciding about passes the Happiness Test, you can go fast. If a decision passes the Happiness Test and the options repeat, you can go e

The time the average person spends deciding what to eat, watch, and wear adds up to 250 to 275 hours per year. That’s a lot of time spent on decisions that intuitively feel like they are inconsequential. It may seem that spending an extra minute of your time here and there on these routine decisions isn’t that big a deal, but that’s because it’s a

Because of the way the human mind works, we tend to view decisions as permanent and final, particularly if they are high impact. We don’t think much in advance about the option to quit. But once you look at decisions through the frame of quit-to-itiveness, you’ll find that for many decisions you thought (or simply assumed) you couldn’t unwind, the

Part of a good decision process includes asking yourself, “If I pick this option, what’s the cost of quitting?” The lower the cost of changing course in the future, the faster you can make your decision, since the option to quit lowers the impact by reducing opportunity cost.

When the outcome turns out poorly, it’s easy to focus on the details that suggest the decision process was poor. We think we are seeing the decision quality rationally because the bad process is obvious. But once the outcome is flipped, we discount or reinterpret the information about the decision quality because the outcome drives us to write a st

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. Small changes in how much you notice the luck that you would otherwise overlook will have a big influence on the way your life turns out. Those small changes act like compounding interest that pays big divi

Any decision is, in essence, a prediction about the future. When you’re making a decision, your objective is to choose the option that gains you the most ground in achieving your goals, taking into account how much you’re willing to risk. (Or sometimes, if there aren’t any good options, your objective is to choose the option that will cause you to

What I’ve experienced in all these different contexts is that people are generally quite poor at explaining how one might go about making a high-quality decision. This difficulty isn’t just confined to novice poker players or college students or entry-level employees. Even when I ask C-level executives—who are literally full-time decision-makers—wh