How to make better decisions

[vander]

1.Clear thinking is the bread and butter of good decision-making. The easiest way to improve the quality of your decisions is to stay away from any kind of decision-making for some preset time, be that a day, a week, or a month. Over time the same emotions that gave you a false sense of certainty will fade, and then, and only then will you know for sure how true clarity looks like and feels.

2.The more you learn the better decision-maker you become, simply for the virtue of being more aware of what you need to be aware of before making a decision. And this is even more important than just being right, as there isn’t much of a difference between that who makes the right decision despite its lack of information and wisdom to do so, and that who simply makes the wrong decision. The true decider is not the Wiseman or woman within, but the gigantic and outer coinflip we call serendipity. Sure you won today, but can you be certain you will tomorrow?

 

3.Decision-making is a process improved by the application of intentional reasoning. The end product, meaning the final decision, must be the result of a rational series of steps starting from a sensible personal theory or hypothesis and culminating with the choice of the best possible next step you can think of. Leaving any part of it to lady luck may lead you to what you want in the short term, but it won’t make you any better as a decision-maker in the long. The next time around you will find yourself once more thirsting for the coin-flip, and the results may not be as good.

When you’re rigorous about the way you make decisions, failure becomes the teacher that tells when something is wrong somewhere in the homework but without giving any details, and it’s by tweaking each step that you learn more about the system as a whole. It’s only then that you change it from the scarily mysterious, to the comfortably familiar. Familiar enough to make you feel like and realize that leaving any decision to chance is a bad idea.

 

4.Like old wisdom says, there is a lot more to be learned from a defeat than there is from a victory. There are gold nuggets of knowledge to be found from a decision deemed wrong by a retrospective look at the past. As at the core of every bad decision lie the traces of whatever personal weakness or character flaws that led you to it in the first place. It’s not enough to ask what you did wrong, but what about you made you do it.
And maybe, just maybe, you will get to prevent not only a single mistake from repeating itself, but an entire class of possible errors of judgment, without ever having to pay the price.

5.It’s from decision to decision that the saw of decision making is sharpened, eventually enough as to allow for the selection of not only the next step, but the right next step from the set of other possible future steps… all of that under the context of the many more that need to be taken to make a vision a reality, whatever it may be, from the smallest goals, so little we don’t even give them the title of “goals”, to the largest of the visions with the power to change not only a single life, but humanity as we know it. The only way to get better at deciding is to decide to decide more often, and to accept that even the best of us are not immune the blunders that come from choosing what to do next and mean it, even when by “meaning it” we mean sticking not just a finger or an arm out, but sometimes even the neck if not the soul for it.

 

What do you think?

 

[kag101]

Hey! I just realized that I created a topic about this same subject on the same day as you posted this one. Lol, synchronicity. Oh... and I also didn't have any replies, lol.

 

On 22/05/2021 at 3:35 AM, vander said:

1.Clear thinking is the bread and butter of good decision-making. The easiest way to improve the quality of your decisions is to stay away from any kind of decision-making for some preset time, be that a day, a week, or a month. Over time the same emotions that gave you a false sense of certainty will fade, and then, and only then will you know for sure how true clarity looks like and feels.

Yes!

On 22/05/2021 at 3:35 AM, vander said:

5.It’s from decision to decision that the saw of decision making is sharpened

Yeap.

On 22/05/2021 at 3:35 AM, vander said:

The only way to get better at deciding is to decide to decide more often, and to accept that even the best of us are not immune the blunders

Good reminder.

 

I have a weakness that I've been working on in regards to decision-making. I wrote about it on the topic that I posted: