Because there are only two things that determine how your life turns out: luck and the quality of your decisions. You have control over only one of those two things.

These exercises were designed to get you thinking about the following concepts: Resulting is the tendency to look at whether a result was good or bad to figure out whether a decision was good or bad. Outcomes cast a shadow over the decision process, leading you to overlook or distort information about the process, making your view of decision

Being more precise, by expressing probabilities as percentages, makes it more likely you’ll uncover information that can correct inaccuracies in your beliefs and broaden your knowledge.

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

For any single decision, there are different ways the future could unfold—some better, some worse. When you make a decision, the decision makes certain paths possible (even if you don’t know where they lead) and others impossible. The decision you make determines which set of outcomes are possible and how likely each of those outcomes is. But it

SIX STEPS TO BETTER DECISION-MAKING Step 1—Identify the reasonable set of possible outcomes. Step 2—Identify your preference using the payoff for each outcome—to what degree do you like or dislike each outcome, given your values? Step 3—Estimate the likelihood of each outcome unfolding. Step 4—Assess the relative likelihood of outcomes you like and

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.

Adding probability estimates to the decision tree will significantly improve the quality of your decisions versus simply identifying the possibilities and your preferences. To make better decisions, you have to consider the likelihood of any outcome occurring, including the ones you prefer and the ones you want to avoid. Without taking this extra

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