DecideBetter! Lessons
You can improve your life by making better decisions. The lessons below are designed to provide you with witty and insightful help in your quest to make better decisions in your life. New lessons are added every week, so be sure to check back here often to get the most recent decision-making lessons.
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NEW LESSON:
We have all experienced buyer’s remorse. Maybe you bought a new car, but then had second thoughts about it when you drove it home. Maybe you bought a new dress, but then started to feel that it just didn’t look as good when you tried it on at home as when you tried it on in the store. Or perhaps you bought a new house, but began to question your decision as soon as you moved in.
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PREVIOUS LESSONS:
When you don’t know much about something, it can appear to be deceptively simple because you don’t know what you don’t know. Something is deceptively simple when you think it’s easy because you don’t know much about it. You look at it superficially, and figure that you know a lot about it when you really don’t. Then you make a major decision on this erroneous assumption that it is simple.
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Everyone has heard the old adage, that “the grass is greener on the other side of the fence.” But just like this adage, all too frequently the grass only appears to be better from your side of the fence, and when you get to see the other grass up close, it really isn’t greener at all.
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Why does a person in California only get .85 of a vote for President in the United States? And why does a person in Alaska get 2 1/2 votes? Is this a fair and proper decision-making system for what is perhaps the most important decision made in the United States?
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The Internet has revolutionized many things, but perhaps nothing is more important than the way it has improved our ability to make decisions. The Internet has greatly expanded the possibilities for and the quality of decision-making by providing more alternatives and more information. More information almost always leads to better decisions.
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Sometimes I feel sorry for Closed-Minded People. Sometimes I envy them. Closed-Minded People make decisions much easier by simply refusing to consider certain alternatives. Sometimes they even refuse to consider making new decisions.
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“Que sera sera, whatever will be will be” are the lyrics from the famous Doris Day song written for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1956 re-make of his 1934 film “The Man Who Knew Too Much”. The song also received an Academy Award for best song in 1956. To many people, it acknowledges a fatalistic belief about the results of decisions they make.
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Some people and even some companies seem to be Decision Proof. They simply cannot make decisions. This problem occurs most often in situations where multiple people need to make a decision but nobody wants to take the lead in making or proposing a decision.
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Hall of fame baseball catcher, Yogi Berra, was noted for his unconventional wisdom that on initial reaction seemed dumb, but on further reflection had a meaningful hidden message. One of these was: “When you get to a fork in the road take it.” On the surface, this seems pretty dumb. You can’t take a fork in the road; you need to pick one of the two roads it presents to you. But the deeper meaning is that you need to decide, not just stop because you can’t decide which road to take.
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A technique that I’ve used very successfully to make major decisions is one that I call “Crossing My Path”. It applies when there is something in the future you want to do or an opportunity you want to take advantage of doing. You don’t need to make a decision now, but don’t want the opportunity to pass by if you neglect it.
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Some people throw caution to the wind when they make a decision. They make risky decisions or, even worse, they make reckless decisions that are almost certain to have an unfavorable outcome.
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When you ask for someone’s advice on making a decision, first understand where he or she may be coming from. What are their personal interests in your decision? What are their biases? If they are going to be affected in some way by your decision, their opinions are most likely shaped by these biases.
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When should the decisions of a community – a town, a state, a country, a company – trump the decisions of the individuals that make up that community?
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What can we learn from the trial and execution of Socrates beyond the risk of being outspoken in a society where the whim of a majority can vote to have you executed? It provides us some insights into the early tradition of decision-making.
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People want things they can’t have. They may be undecided if they want something, but when you tell them they can’t have it, they will certainly decide that they want it.
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In October 1988, I was on my way to Singapore, and I stopped at the airport in Los Angeles for an overnight layover. Before I went to bed for the night, I decided to take a short walk down Century Boulevard between the Marriott and Hilton hotels. Soon after I started my walk, a car pulled up on the sidewalk behind me and the passenger jumped out and ran ahead to a series of the newspaper boxes ahead of me. He then turned and came at me with a 20 inch knife.
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When I taught MBA students, I used this exercise to trick them into paying $3 for a $1 bill in order to teach them a lesson on decision-making.
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Sometimes you make a decision that has consequences you had not even considered. Sometimes you can even make what you think is an insignificant decision that has significant unexpected consequences.
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Have you ever been "of two minds" about a decision? You feel strongly about two alternatives and are unable to choose between them. When you are "of two minds," you are enthusiastic about both alternatives. You can argue each alternative strongly, and you really do want each of them.
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Are consensus decisions superior or inferior to individual decisions? It really depends on two sets of motives: the motives for making a consensus decision in the first place, and the motives of the participants.
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Decisions made by teams are often better than those made by individuals, simply because the collective experience and brain-power of a team frequently trump the smarts of one person. Some people need to be convinced of this though.
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Why do tens of millions of people play the lottery even though the odds are so bad, and only half is given back as prize money? There is a saying that mathematicians don't gamble, so could it be that people play because they don't understand the odds?
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When you are facing a major decision, here is a successful technique that I use to avoid making the wrong decision. What you do is make a tentative decision and try it on for a while to see if it fits, just as you would try on clothes before deciding to buy them.
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You will probably make a million decisions during your lifetime. This is my estimate for a typical person over his or her lifetime. Most of these decisions are routine. Other decisions are not so routine.
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When former President Bill Clinton was forced to explain his indiscretions with Monica Lewinsky, he ended up offering a disturbing rationale for a decision: "I did it because I could." He didn't decide that it was the right thing to do; in fact he later admitted it was wrong. He decided to do it simply because he could. I think what he meant was, "I did it because I thought I could get away with it."
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In his book, The Executive Brain, Dr. Elkhonon Goldberg, a Russian neuropsychologist, argues that whether you are decisive or wishy-washy depends on how the frontal lobes of your brain work. Frontal lobes play a major role in how we approach "adaptive" decisions, meaning decisions with unknown consequenses.
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When a group of individuals has an important decision to make, I've found that a Two-Step process works best. First, the group meets to become familiar with the decision. What exactly, is it that needs to be decided? What, exactly, is the goal or the desired end result? What factors need to be considered?
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All people approach decision-making in different ways. It's not to say that one approach is better than the others, and often they arrive at the same results from very opposite mental processes. How does this happen? It's almost like a group of Spanish philosophers and a group of Swiss chemists collaborating to dig a transit tunnel. After a lot of very dis-analogous digging, from opposite directions, the two tunnels somehow meet up in near-perfect alignment.
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Do you make better decisions standing or sitting? Or maybe walking or running or lying on the floor helps you to make your best decisions? Is there a certain place you like to go when faced with a big decision? Many people make most of their decisions sitting down, or even with their feet up on their desk. How do you make your best decisions?
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The lyrics of the 1980s song "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" by the group Tears For Fears capture what may be the worst combination of decisional deficits: No goal or plan for the future, so no basis for deciding what to do next. Without a set of future goals to guide present decisions, who know what we'll decide next? Does it even matter?
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Bad decisions build an invaluable experience base that helps improve future decisions. Of course, good decisions also build an experience base, but people tend to learn more from bad decisions. Bad decisions inflict costs - often very expensive and painful costs - and by learning from our bad decisions we can often recoup those costs in the future through making better decisions.
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I've Been Framed. You've been framed. Everyone has been framed in one way or another, whether they know it or not. What this refers to is decision framing. Decisions are framed by the choices offered to the decision-maker, and by how those choices are presented. There are several varieties of framing, and you can often direct someone's decision by how you frame it. But the same can be done to you, so watch out.
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If decision deadlines cause you anxieties, or even lead to mental blocks, it's time to change your relationship with them. Deadlines are not our opponents. They can be good masters, and even better servants. Either way, they're on our side.
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People tend to place a higher value on something that belongs to them than they would place on that same item if they had to choose to purchase it. This is a common occurence when you participate in a Yankee Gift Swap. Understanding how this affects you can provide some helpful insights into certain decision situations. Be aware of how this decision bias affects decisions - yours and others.
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Nowor Never is not a person, but a ploy; a pressure tactic summoned up from the ether by car salesmen and real estate agents and purveyors of uncountable other goods and services, to frighten us into making rash decisions. But once you realize that Nowor Never is a figment of the consumer's anxious imagination, you can put him to work for you.
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If you have a coin in your pocket, you're in possession of a powerful decision-making device. Flipping a coin is a vastly underrated method for making decisions. It works well most of the time, but not for the reason most people would imagine.
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If you drop a frog in boiling water (or so I've been told), it immediately jumps out. However, if you put a frog in a pot of room-temperature water and then bring the water to a boil very, very slowly, the frog will supposedly stay in the water until it dies. It's an odd experiment, but it's an apt metaphor for how people sometimes deal with slowly deteriorating situations.
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