Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work
by Chip Heath, Dan Heath
Rating: 4.0 / 5 · Read · Finished 2023-05-02
Pretty good as far as pop psychology goes. It will take living with the advice for a while before I know how good it is. They do their best to organize things into a cohesive framework, but it’s really more of a big collection of tips and tricks.
Some of my favorite points:
- there’s always a third option (or fourth or fifth)
- reject “whether or not” questions
- vanishing options test - if you couldn’t do any of the current options, what would you do
- disagreement means you’ve found multiple distinct good options
- find someone who’s solved your problem before
- generate ideas by analogy - at multiple levels of abstraction
- avoid option favoritism by asking for each idea, “what would have to be true to make this the best option?”
- anecdotes and statistics each affect how you see the other
- if you don’t know how something will go, try it out before committing
- how will you view this decision 10 months or years from now?
- what would you tell a friend to do?
- if you’re stuck between two good options, examine your core values
- make predictions in terms of a range of possible outcomes: good, bad and likely
- avoid putting off decisions forever by setting tripwires (time limit, money limit, etc)