· 2 min read

Decision Making Heuristics

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Photo by Tim Graf on Unsplash

These heuristics can serve as a useful guide only if one trusts the reasoning behind each.

Tell the Truth 1

By telling and articulating the truth, you remove clutter/garbage and focus on what really matters.

If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

World if filled with scam artists.

Do/Try/Invest in many things. You don’t have any decision making capacity unless you have an offer.

You don’t have any decision making capacity unless you have an offer on the table.

So apply for multiple jobs, learn multiple skills, meet multiple people, try multiple options; you don’t know which ones will stick at first.

If downside is negligible, reversible or it can be capped and upside is very high, do it. 2

If you can gain 2x, 10x from the decision and the loss in negligible or reversible, the potential upside is much much higher.

If you need to make a big decision and you can’t decided, say No. 3

Modern world is abundant with opportunities. You’ll find another one.

If there are multiple similar options and each seem similar, take the path that seems the hardest in the short term. 3

Your brain is likely compensating short term hard right path for an easy path. Easy paths also have a higher chance of being too good to be true.

If you can’t decide, pick the decision that will lead you to more peace of mind. 3

You can only continue to make good decisions if you have a peace of mind. If it violates your consens, say no.

Let others make there own decisions

Mind your own decisions

Delay the impulsive decision by 30 minutes or an hour or a day

Don’t be implulsive

Be decisive

Every decision is choosing one thing over other things. You won’t always have 100% information.

Be decisive: Temporary fix to a temporary problem becomes a permanent problem.

Metrics

Extreme decision are rarely good.

Even if you think mathematically, extreme decisions would lie on the edge of all the possible decisions you can make. In almost any case, you have more number of non-extreme decisions you can make during any decisions. So probabilistically since number of extreme decisions are low, chances that they must he good is low. On one level this analysis is dumb too.

Say no to many things

The goal of a decision to do something is to have high ROI than from doing other things.

Footnotes

  1. Jordan Peterson

  2. Tim Ferriss

  3. Naval Ravikant 2 3


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