How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

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.

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 do

Any decision is, in essence, a prediction about the future. 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. (Or sometimes, if there aren’t any good options, your objective is to choose the option that will cause you to

I believe this is a pretty noncontroversial thing to say: It’s important to improve your decision process, because it’s the one thing you have control over in determining the quality of your life.

When the outcome turns out poorly, it’s easy to focus on the details that suggest the decision process was poor. We think we are seeing the decision quality rationally because the bad process is obvious. But once the outcome is flipped, we discount or reinterpret the information about the decision quality because the outcome drives us to write a st

Decision quality and outcome quality are, of course, correlated. But not perfectly, at least not in most decisions we make, and certainly not when we have only one try at the decision. The relationship between the two can take a long time to play out.

It’s not easy to be willing to give up the credit that comes from feeling like you made good things happen, but it is worth it in the long run. Small changes in how much you notice the luck that you would otherwise overlook will have a big influence on the way your life turns out. Those small changes act like compounding interest that pays big divi

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 quali

There’s a name for this: Resulting. When people result, they look at whether the result was good or bad to figure out if the decision was good or bad. (Psychologists call this “outcome bias,” but I prefer the more intuitive term “resulting.”) We take this resulting shortcut because we can’t clearly “see” whether the decision was good or bad, especi