How to Take Good Decisions?
Hey everyone! I'm trying to get better at decision-making, both at work and in everyday life. Do you have any favorite books, articles, or courses that really helped you make better choices? I'd love any recommendations—whether it's practical tips, interesting frameworks, or just great reads. Thanks in advance!
Here you go ! https://fs.blog/
It's a very good blog - albeit getting a bit too much 'commercialized' in the last years. The guy also wrote a book, which I found pretty good: https://fs.blog/clear/
That being said, you can read all this stuff, but more importantly - you need to apply it. This is the hard part.
Hey Alchmeist, on the other hand application if done right can give exponential rather than linear results so I completely understand your point... I liked your response a lot, are there any other such similar resources or videos that you have known about?
If you like Farnam Street, then go read about Charlie Munger - who is quoted quite often on the blog.
If you've never heard about him, and you want to learn about thinking and decision making, he's THE guy.
I find that just stopping to think helps a lot. People rarely make time for thinking things through. You can’t organise everything within the 10 minutes of peace you get in the shower.
I will often go for a walk or sit in a cafe with a sheet of paper and just think about the problem. I try to define the problem properly before I even start thinking about solutions.
For trickier problems, you just need time. I go on a long bike ride and let ideas simmer until they break down into something simpler and more manageable. I get my best work done after my weeks-long hikes and rides.
Above all, know thyself. Having some awareness of your own biases and irrationality helps you correct the course. Knowing what you like, where you tend to get stuck and what you suck at helps a lot.
I think a lot of people struggle with decision-making in their lives. For me personally, I tend to take time to go through all my options, think about them for a while, and make what I think is the most logical choice given the facts at hand. If I have to make a rushed decision, because we are not always given the luxury of time, I trust my gut with the facts as they are presented to me in the moment.
Do I make mistakes, sometimes? I also beat myself up over them more than I should. The important thing though is to learn from the mistake to be better prepared next time. Here are a few tips that may be suitable for you.
1. Always view your problem from different perspectives instead of sticking with your initial solution. ... 2. Do not make a decision just because it is the most comfortable. ... 3. If you already have your mind made up, do not just seek information that supports what you want to do. ... 4. Focus on the decision that is in front of you and your present situation.
Some time ago I read an insightful article here however I do not remember exact URL: https://www.lifelords.com/success/
As for books, Jocko Willink's Extreme Ownership is a good place to start. Take ownership of yourself and become the best version of yourself.
Never forget `Pareto', you will find it applies to most of life. Quote> The Pareto principle (also known as the 80/20 rule, the law of the vital few and the principle of factor sparsity) states that for many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes (the "vital few"). <End quote.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle
This is often misconstrued.
80% of sales come from 20% of the customers > yes, fire the customers who bring in 80% of the work.
80% of goals come from 20% of the players > no, your formation should not change everyone to forwards
Opportunities come 80% from networking, 20% from working hard > if you spend all your time networking, people would avoid you
Very often there's a support structure in place which leads to to the results.
I'm a big fan of the decision matrix, where you boil down a decision into options and criteria, then can score how important each criterion is and how well each option fulfills the criterion. I think it helps provide a way to make your intuitions a little more concrete, and to start reasoning about them.
Here's a very simple decision matrix web app https://www.ruminate.io/.
I'm also building a tool for analyzing problems, which includes functionality for a decision matrix: https://ameliorate.app/. Most of it centers around clarifying causes and effects of problems/solutions, which can also help you grasp a situation. Here's an example of a decision I've made with the tool for picking which ORM to use for building the tool itself: https://ameliorate.app/examples/ORM?view=Tradeoffs+scored+as....
I am practicing a different approach lately. Rather than spending energy on taking good decision I'd pick a decent one out of the options I have and work on it to make it good in the timeframe available for execution.
Philosophy is the "love/friendship for/of wisdom". Wisdom is the art of making right decisions given a set of constrains (limited knowledge, things you don't control, etc).
For teamwork there are frameworks like DACI https://www.atlassian.com/team-playbook/plays/daci that, along with a low ego, blameless, professional culture can end up helping to make well informed decisions. It can handle a NoSQL vs. Relational type decision as a breeze! The whole team (s) should be involved. It beats the classic talking shop get everyone in a room and someone starts rambling, and you try to solve every itch anyone can think of.
I understand the resistance of developers to such frameworks. Maybe Scrum misuse killed all enthusiasm.
Both inside and outside of work: 5 whys is good.
Think of 1 and 2 way doors. If the decision is reversible it is almost an experiment. Travel for 4 weeks or 12 weeks? Doesn't matter as you can fly home at any point.
Even buying a house is fairly reversible although selling immediately will be costly.
Having children is a one way door. Having dogs or cats is really too (or should be considered as)
Quitting a job may be 1 or 2 way. If you are high level at Google it may be impossible to get back to something like that soon. If you have a regular web dev job you can probably get something like that again if you decide to take time to do something else.
Bumping it up!
There isn’t such a generic skill as “decision making”.
Sorry to disappoint but quality of your decisions grow only proportional to your expertise in some area.
There are adjacent and similar areas, so by getting better at one you improve your decision making in others as well.
But any book that tries to sell you generic “decision making” skill is a piece of garbage.
This is how skills work fundamentally.
Meta-skills cannot be learned, can’t be trained. This is why they are meta
You can train chess moves and design patterns. There's definitely best practice books like The 33 Strategies of War, Greene. The startup world has lots of these as well - how to discover product market fit, how to run teams, when to hire COOs. Not all advice fits all situations, but having various palettes is handy.
Is every chess champion a rich successful investor?
What you mention only confirms my point - you can improve your decision making only in a certain area.
do you have any resources in that direction? Like we have around what atleast 5000 years of human history and history for larger part repeats itself.. there has to be some way to tap into this to optimize decision making.
I remember reading this a few years back and thinking it was insightful: https://commoncog.com/a-framework-for-putting-mental-models-.... Do give it a try. It has overlaps with Farnam Street's content.
The answer is - be specific.
Focus on exact narrow areas (even “startups” is way to generic, “startups fundraising” or “hiring in startups” are better examples) you want to improve.
And slowly (with life experience) you’ll build up a good intuition in those areas. But don’t expect it will help you be great in other distant fields. Though it may happen by accident or because you’re generally smart enough to avoid mistakes.
It's a very broad question. If you're looking into 5000 years of human history, there's the Robert Greene books - 33 Strategies of War, 48 Laws of Power, human nature, mastery, etc. The guy did classical history, then had his run of politics in Hollywood; so this sounds like what you're looking for.
Also nobody likes this answer, but religion writes the manuals to life. All major religions have done their research and wrote books. There's a stark contrast between ancient Greek philosophy to when Christianity came in. There were unsolveable problems that the philosophers couldn't tackle, like Aristotle believed that if a great made a mistake they were done for. And then Jesus came in with the idea of repentance and flipped this on its head. The word "hamartia" changed from "missing the mark" to "sinning", and sins are recoverable.
Then Islam based the ideal lifestyle around every behavior and action by the Prophet Muhammad, from sleeping, headaches, eating, treating guests, treating enemies, and so on. Philosophy became necessary because later there would be scenarios where there was no precedent for decision making, so they wanted analogies. Aristotelian philosophy became a tool for this. Then you had Avicennian philosophy, which developed into inductive logic... things we take for granted today like symptoms. Then al-Ghazali came in and labeled all of the philosophers as nonsense, and Greek philosophy was buried until the 19th century.
So if you want a tldr, read al-Ghazali. His big work was Tahāfut al-Falāsifa ("Incoherence of the Philosophers"), but if you want something simpler and much more practical, try Ayyuhal Walad ("Advice to a Son/Student"). It's hard to find an English translation that properly captures the sarcastic bite in his writing though. Plenty of religious figures were funny and sarcastic too.
Honestly, as a society, I think we've gone full circle. We're rediscovering meditation/mindfulness. Which is a fair point - approach all decisions from a fresh mind. But that works up to a point. There's just so much that it takes a while just to go over what to cover and what not to cover.
> Robert Greene books - 33 Strategies of War, 48 Laws of Power, human nature, mastery, etc
As an overview and primitive generalization of some more or less obvious ideas about human nature to read for fun - good enough.
As a real learning tool - garbage.