No one has taught us how to make great decisions, and the decisions we make daily could make all the difference in our lives and how we decide to live them.
Some decisions with low impact are reversible, while others with high impact are not. Usually, we stop to think about the high impact of, for example, getting married, accepting a job offer, or investing our savings. However, on low-impact decisions, we tend to go in automatically and dismiss the compound effect in our daily choices. For example, eating healthy food, exercising, or setting aside time to spend quality time with our family.
Learning how to make great decisions will make a huge difference in our lives, like getting the best results, achieving our goals, solving problems, building trust, and, not less importantly, driving us to the person we want to be and establishing our personal growth. The quality of our decisions eventually determines how far we go.
Improving our decision process is not only a skill but a series of tools and frameworks that we can learn to incorporate into our mental toolbox. Learning to make great decisions consistently will help us improve our lives and move above average or merely good.
In his book Clear Thinking, Shane Parrish shared insightful guidelines for making wiser decisions each day.
One important factor to improve our decisions is knowing our blind spots and managing them. If we don’t, the defaults will take control.
There is a gap in our thinking that comes from believing that the way we see the world is the way the world really works. Only when we change our perspective—when we look at the situation through the eyes of other people—do we realize what we’re missing. We begin to appreciate our own blind spots and see what we’ve been missing.
—Shane Parrish
In his book, he shared two principles to evaluate and improve our decision process:
The process principle: When you evaluate a decision, focus on the process you used to make the decision and not the outcome. Even the best decision-makers get bad results from time to time, though. Making a good decision is about the process, not the outcome
The transparency principle: Make your decision-making process as visible and open to scrutiny as possible. If you don’t check your thinking at the time you made the decision—what you knew, what you thought was important, and how you reasoned about it—you’ll never know whether you made a good decision or just got lucky.
He continues reflecting on the importance of good decisions:
Most errors in judgment happen when we don’t know we’re supposed to be exercising judgment. They happen because our subconscious is driving our behaviors and cutting us out of the process of determining what we should do. (...) Managing your defaults requires more than willpower. (...) Overriding your defaults requires implementing safeguards that render the invisible visible and that prevent you from acting too soon. And it requires cultivating habits of mind—accountability, knowledge, discipline, and confidence—that put you on the right track and keep you there.
The improvement you make in your decision process compounds. All good decisions are effective, but not all effective decisions are good. The actions we take today are the actions that will separate our past from our future.
¿What are you doing to learn how to improve your decision-making process?