Decisive. How to make better choices in life and work

•”Any time in life you’re tempted to think, ‘Should I do this OR that?’ instead, ask yourself, ‘Is there a way I can do this AND that?’ It’s surprisingly frequent that it’s feasible to do both things.”

•we tend to define our choices too narrowly, to see them in binary terms. We ask, “Should I break up with my partner or not?” instead of “What are the ways I could make this relationship better?”

•You encounter a choice. But narrow framing makes you miss options.

You analyze your options. But the confirmation bias leads you to gather self-serving information.

You make a choice. But short-term emotion will often tempt you to make the wrong one.

Then you live with it.

•narrow framing is when you decide between two options within the same domain (should I break up with him or not), (should I go to a party or not). You can resolve narrow framing by thinking broader (should I go to a party or should I watch a movie or go to spa)

•another way to make better decisions is to calculate opportunity costs as what you’d lose by not making this decision 

• “Necessity is the mother of invention”. When we are forced to unfix from a preselected option, we start to find new better solutions

•“If I’m going to make something that goes fast, I tend to look at everything that goes fast and the mechanisms that make things go fast. So I started looking at man-made objects like boats, torpedoes, space shuttles, everything.”

•we are more than twice as likely to favor confirming information than disconfirming information

•What if our least favorite option were actually the best one? What data might convince us of that?

•if you want to make a better decision, you can just ask for advice from a person who has more experience than you 

•another way to make better actions is to zoom out from your internal perspective to the global one, comparing your actions/product/company to have its perceived outside

•don’t guess the idea, when you can test the idea (don’t make assumptions about people’s choices or performance - test them)

•short-term emotions may blind our decision making. We may ask ourselves “What would I tell my best friend to do in this situation?” to get rid of the unwanted emotions

•over the course of a week, managers spent no time whatsoever on their core priorities