Decision Making, Good and Bad: How to Make the Right Decision at a Critical Moment?

As a person with difficulty choosing, making decisions is a difficult thing to do.

Take online shopping, I usually shop around, choose a few to add to the shopping cart, and compare and choose in these few, even so, still can't make up my mind, but also send the link to the family, let him help make a decision.

From my personal point of view, my choice difficulty stems from not wanting to take responsibility, thinking that as long as the final decision is not made by me, this thing or this thing can have nothing to do with me if it is not good.

To put it bluntly, I want to avoid making incorrect and regrettable decisions. So is there a "methodology" for making decisions?

In his new book Decision Making, Good and Bad, Chris Black uses psychological knowledge, probability knowledge, and playing card skills to help us understand the role of luck and judgment in decision-making, analyze what we are thinking in our minds when we make decisions, guide us how to make decisions in change, point out what biases and mistakes we have in decision-making, and how we can become better decision-makers.

This book conducts a meticulous investigation and study of the complex mechanism behind our decision-making, and uses a large number of cases and vivid language to explain the underlying logic of decision-making. This book mentions how many government workers and business managers make major decisions, although we ordinary people often do not make these life-and-death decisions, but the methodology can also guide us how to make decisions about small things on a daily basis.

01

I used to think that selection difficulties were just a pathology, not a disease.

It wasn't until I saw a real case one day that I realized that not being able to make a decision was really a disease.

There was a man named Elliot in the United States who had an operation to remove a small tumor in the cerebral cortex, and after the operation, he found that he had a disease that could not make decisions.

This disease is an upgraded version of the difficulty of choosing, the difficulty of choosing is just a tangle, and he really can't make a decision.

Take which restaurant to eat, normal people may struggle with whether to eat hot pot or eat stir-fried vegetables, he not only has to consider whether the menu and the price of the dish is reasonable, whether the parking space is sufficient, and even run over to see if the restaurant light is dim, the guests are more or less... In short, he has a hard time making decisions.

This seemingly no big deal caused him to lose his job, divorce, and bankruptcy, disrupting everything before him.

The reason for all this is that he loses his emotions, and emotions prove to occupy a very important place in decision-making.

02

Sometimes I feel like I'm too emotional and impulsive in making decisions. But in Chris Black's view, this is precisely the "intuitive judgment" that is used most frequently when making decisions.

Intuition is an invisible hand that guides our judgments and prejudices.

The emergence of intuition depends on the power of emotions.

It can be said that if we pursue reason and reason in every decision, we cannot make a decision. Every decision we make is emotional.

Des Wilson famously argued that correct judgment often leads to wrong results.

Chris Black agrees that we try to rule out future probabilities with data and information processing capabilities, only to find that the future is as uncertain as ever. We are trained to deal with certainty, but it is only when we learn to deal with uncertainty that we are really necessary.

03

The heart depends on feelings, and the brain relies on rational judgment. To make the right decision, you need to combine heart and brain.

The reason is simple to say, but in the process of actually making decisions, we either have to be impulsive, or it is difficult to choose between the pros and cons for a long time.

Is there a good way to train your determination?

Chris Black mentions several times in his book that one way to improve decision-making is to record every decision.

Whether it is a small decision in daily life or a major decision about the fate of life, it is worth recording and writing down the reasons for doing so.

After waiting for half a year or more to come out, with the results of the decision, go through the records of the decision at that time to test whether your judgment is reliable.

Chris Black emphasizes that only by documenting what has happened can we discover biases that influence judgment and imaginary connections.

This is actually the popular re-examination thinking, which is a record and correction action. Just as muscle memory is formed after an athlete repeatedly practicing an action, the repetition of the action decided by the review will also form a conditional launch, which will help us make the right decision as much as possible.

But just as top athletes make mistakes, even if we do a lot of decision-making training, we may still make decisions that we regret. Chris Black also gives several "rules of thumb" to tell us that no one person can make a perfect decision, and that taking advantage of what is good is perhaps the wisest decision.

2022 New Book Decisions, Good and Bad Key Moments Make the Right Choices Leadership Business Management Books ¥77.7 Buy