1 MAKING REVERSIBLE OR FIXABLE DECISION AS
Heuristics and rules of thumb that i use quite a lot the first is looking to make reversible or fixable decisions as quickly as possible.
You don’t need to do a pro and con list for a lot of things. You don’t need to deliberate a lot of things. You don’t need to make the perfect decision for a lot of things. If you want to preserve your decision-making calories for the things that actually matter and your creativity, then I try to make decisions that are really not mission critical in some way.
For instance, the type of toilet paper to buy or the type of toothpaste to buy. I know people are going to debate all of these. They could even seem like big decisions, like renting a certain Airbnb or whatever it might be. But if they are reversible, let’s say they’re easily cancelable, you could get a refund, or it’s so inexpensive that you could just buy a second option, then making those decisions quickly and training yourself to do that is a habit you need to cultivate.
This will save you a lot of energy so that you’re more perceptive for the decisions that matter a lot more or where the stakes are higher.
2 RISK BENEFIT
Another set of decisions let’s just say one level up i will use pro and con list but really what i think is more helpful is a risk benefit so you’re writing down sort of the best case scenarios and the worst case scenarios for different options you could use that for choosing to invest in a given company or not you could use that for a million different things and if the downside is capped if you can cap the downside and there is asymmetrical upside meaning you might make 2x 10x 100x 1000x then you know at least your maximum losses.
risk benefit i find more helpful than pro con which can just be a laundry list of different things to compare and contrast i don’t find that terribly actionable
3 WHOLE BODY
Now layered on top of all of this is what is sometimes called a whole body yes. I was exposed to this by Diana Chapman and Jim Dethmer of the Conscious Leadership Group. I think I’m getting the name of the company correct. This is what it looks like: it’s very simple. You’re considering a decision and you scan head, heart, chest, and gut. There are other ways to do this; you could go to your loins too. But let’s just say you’re going with head, chest area, heart, and gut. You look for a yes signal, a go signal in all three areas. That is the only situation in which you should say yes.
Now, what I find a little challenging is identifying what a yes feels like. So what I do instead is I look for no signals. What that means is if I feel any contraction or grinding of the gears in my head, it’s a no. If I feel any contraction in my chest or my chest area, it’s a no. If I feel anything in my gut, it’s a no. These are disconfirming signals.
Where this is helpful is you can do the risk-benefit analysis, you can do all these types of analyses and come to the conclusion that you should do something, something is a good idea. But if it feels off, I have learned to say no, especially as it relates to people. If you just get some spider sense intuition that you shouldn’t do something or something feels off, say no.
INTUTION
So, intuition, I find most helpful when it is pointing in a different direction from your analysis. If you believe you should do something and your intuition says no but you really want to do it, I would err on the side of listening to what we’ll call intuition in this case. If the math doesn’t make sense, this doesn’t make sense, but perhaps you should do it.
Now, this financially only makes sense if you have a lot of money, you can cap your losses, and you have some investing experience. Sometimes things can work out when you just get a really good feeling about someone. You can also piss away a lot of money, so caveat emptor.
The opposite and the unhelpful form of intuition, I think, which people use all the time and certainly I’ve used, is very, very common. People say, “My intuition tells me to do X. My intuition tells me to do Y. I need to listen to my intuition,” when you’re really just using that sort of unassailable concept. People can’t debate your intuition to do what you want to do, right? So you haven’t really taken any of the preceding steps. You haven’t done any risk-benefit analysis. You haven’t thought through the decision. You just want to do something and then you use intuition as a catch-all excuse or rationalization to do it. That, in my opinion, is not intuition; that’s generally just bullshit.
So there you have it—some tips for decision making and also my thoughts on good versus bad or helpful versus unhelpful, often worse than that, self-defeating so-called intuition.