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Life involves making an infinite number of decisions every day. Few things will have as much impact on your life as the ability to make better decisions.
This article, based on a conversation I had recently, aims to provide a guide to the art of decision-making, and focuses on how to develop sound judgement, a critical ingredient for successful decision-making.
There are many types of decisions we make –
- A simple decision like whether to have tea or coffee in the morning or which route to take to work every day,
- A complex decision like which house to buy, dealing with life-threatening situations,
- A repetitive decision of what to eat for breakfast or dinner,
- An infrequent or ‘one-off’ decision like which person to marry, whether to undergo surgery or not,
- A conscious decision like buying the first house,
- An unconscious decision like drinking coffee in the morning out of a habit formed over the years.
A word of caution before you read further This article is applicable to simple, repetitive decision, at work or in personal life, that are consciously made but over time could become ‘unconscious’ or habits. This article is not applicable to complex or ‘one-off’ decisions as they involve a few others considerations that I will explore in a separate article.
What is a decision?
The dictionary defines decision (or the verb decide) as ‘select as a course of action‘ and ‘to make a final choice or judgment about.‘
A decision comprises of three critical elements:
Selection or choice from available options. This involves gathering best possible information on the available options. A decision is involved only when there is a choice about the action to take. If there is no choice to be made, there is no decision. It is rare to have no choice. There is always a choice to do something or the other. If not, there is always a choice to do or not do that thing.
Exercise of Judgement. The critical element of making decisions is exercising sound judgement in a given situation.
Action. Actions are the products of decisions. A decision should trigger an action. If you make a decision, but no action follows, then that decision is not worth the energy spent. For example, if you spent ten minutes deciding whether to drink coffee or tea, decided to go for tea, but don’t have tea or coffee or anything else, what was the point of making the decision.
Why is it essential to make the right decision?
It is essential to make the right decisions to be successful at something or achieve a specific objective. Whatever that objective or definition of success may be for you.
Every goal we set and every action we take to achieve the goal starts with a decision.
The quality of decisions determines whether we are successful in our own eyes or other’s eyes and the quality of life we live.
How to make the right decisions?
A simple answer is to get better at all the three things that make up a decision – the selection or choice, the judgement, and the action.
In my opinion, the most complex of the three is ‘Judgement’. Judgement involves a mix of intuition, or gut-feel, and logical thinking. It is heavily influenced by experience, personal biases, and blind spots, often unconscious, which makes decision-making hard.
How do we go about developing sound judgement required for decision-making?
My experience suggests –
- Right decisions come from sound judgement.
- Sound judgement comes from experience.
- Experience comes from making wrong decisions or mistakes.
Let’s explore the implications of these three statements in detail.
Making wrong decisions is essential to making the right decisions.
This statement sounds like circular logic, where one thing leads to the second, and the latter leads to the first.
But let me explain with a couple of examples.
Example #1
If you have performed a specific action repeatedly, say cutting an apple to take a simple example, then most likely, you have identified the correct method and all the tips and tricks involved in it.
If you have repeated this action a hundred times, then you have fine-tuned the way you hold the apple and the knife, the angle at which to hold the blade, the right amount of pressure to apply, and the sequence in which to make the cuts that produces a perfectly cut apple!
It is challenging to be unsuccessful at something you have done repeatedly.
It is challenging to make a mistake at cutting an apple if you have done it a hundred times. Most likely, you have achieved perfection and elevated your performance to an ‘art of cutting apples’ level.
Granted exceptions can exist due to medical and health reasons, or when you are distracted; however, this above is true for the vast majority of people.
If you are unsuccessful repeatedly, you need to do serious introspection on why continued effort is not producing the desired outcome.
You can be successful by getting incrementally better at things you perform repeatedly.
There’s nothing wrong with continuing to do what you are successful at doing. You can keep improving on things you repeatedly do. Depending on your situation or objective, this may be enough and may constitute ‘success’. For example, Gillette continues to maintain its razor market share by incrementally increasing the blades in their razors from 2 to 5 now. There is nothing but incremental improvement to a proven product.
But in many cases, this incremental improvement may not be enough to meet the objective or be successful.
Also, I am sure, like me, you’ve felt bored by things you have done or experiences you have had repeatedly (even in areas where you were wildly successful), and that has created an urge and drive to seek new adventures. It is human nature to seek new pastures fuelled by hope and dreams, even if it involves leaving safe, certain, and favourable circumstances.
Example #2
Think of an instance where you started a new activity from scratch and achieved a specific objective or success, like learning a bicycle or getting good marks in an exam. Were you perfect the first time you rode that bicycle or took that exam?
More often than not, we all learned from the mistakes we made (or received guidance from our family and friends based on their own unsuccessful or partly successful attempts), developed better judgement on riding that bicycle or taking that exam and eventually got better at it.
Mistakes, essential for developing sound judgement, are possible mostly in activities you have not performed before.
There are three key takeaways from this statement:
Seek new experiences for personal growth. If you want significant growth, you need to actively seek new experiences or exposure to new jobs/roles, or different levels of responsibility and accountability, where the probability of making mistakes or failure is higher.
Learn the right lessons when you make mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes. If you make a mistake, it is imperative to learn the proper lessons from it.
No one is perfect when they start. Remember what we see as perfection or overnight success involved hundreds of unsuccessful or partially successful attempts and years of effort to achieve perfection. Most of these unsuccessful attempts are not visible to us and we get amazed by the ‘overnight’ successes.
Right lessons to learn from mistakes
So what are the right lessons to learn from mistakes:
Admit that you made a mistake. Acceptance of the situation is the beginning of change and growth. Denial produces the opposite result.
Make improvements. Identify what could be done better and then make the change before trying again. Don’t keep on repeating the same action or approach and expect a different result. The first time something happens could be a mistake, but the second time it happens is a choice.
Overcome the fear of failure. The wrong lesson would be to avoid performing that activity ever again just because you failed. Don’t get discouraged by occasional hiccups.
Repeat. All success comes from performing an action, course-correcting, or fine-tuning the approach quickly when the desired result is not produced and repeating. Bruce Lee once said, he was not afraid of the person who practiced 10,000 different kicks; he was afraid of the person who practiced the same kick 10,000 times.
Overcoming the fear of failure
Fear of failure prevents people from making another attempt at their goal after they have failed. Hence it is vital to stay positive and have the right perspective when faced with failure.
I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.
Thomas Edison
Failure is an opportunity to do things differently, and a chance to learn how ‘not to do’ something.
My experience suggests that most people will get their judgement right or partially right three or four out of five times when facing new situations.
Once you find the formula, even if imperfect, fine-tune and repeat till you are perfect.
One out of five times, you will fail. Accept it. All of us have to deal with occasional hiccups, no matter how sensible, systematic, and rational, we were in the decisions-making and our actions. If you failed, make improvements and keep going.
Learn from others’ mistakes.
Its not necessary that all your learning comes from your own mistakes. It is possible to learn from the mistakes of others.
I regard it as a criminal waste of time to go through the slow and painful ordeal of ascertaining things for one’s self if these same things have already been ascertained and made available by others.
Thomas Edison
Others generally happen to be our family and friends. However, tools like books, interactions with new people, internet/social media give us access to the expertise of strangers in different fields and allow us to tap into their knowledge and experience. Invest your time in these tools extensively and wisely!
Importance of Intuition
Intuition is the ability to understand something instinctively, without the need for conscious reasoning.
Learning from the experience of others is a good substitute in most situations. However, intuition is the product of one’s own experiences and usually has no suitable alternatives.
People with action-bias are successful more often primarily because they make more attempts at achieving a goal. They fail more often, but they also succeed more often.
Consequently, an action-bias is a healthy habit to develop when you want to grow your judgement and intuition in any given situation.
Conclusion
The process that one undergoes to develop judgement, consciously or unconsciously, is the price of achieving your goals and being successful. It takes a decade or more to become an overnight success.
In summary,
“to make the right decisions,
you should develop sound judgement,
which comes from experience,
which in turn comes from wrong decisions (your own or others’),
made during exposure to situations where you don’t have prior experience,
and learned the right lessons from the failures.”
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Awesome one – Repeatedly doing something helps us make better decisions and yes I am fan of intuitions!
Actions are most important things and failing is as good!
“Falling is improving” has been my creed for many years. Also, when I started teaching skiing or a language it became my first words to the learners. Loooooove your article, easy to read and so powerful at the same time!
My project name is based on the word “intuition” as you said not be scared of falling AND follow your intuition is probably the best advice one can give to someone when big decision come!