Decisive: How To Make Better Choices In Life and Work

Project Description

Subtitle: How To Make Better Choices In Life and Work

By: Chip Heath & Dan Heath

Notes:

• Process matters more than analysis by 6x to make good decisions.
• Hinting at alternative purchasing decisions is enough to greatly improve our primary purchase decision.
• The best names come from considering many names at once.
  • Use multiple teams and have each pursue a different angle.
  • It’s less efficient, but produces better results.
• Never ask if you can do this or that. Always try for both.
• Producing simultaneous designs and getting feedback at the same time helped to produce better results.
  • Helps the designers to feel less criticized, since they have multiple designs.
  • Multi-tracking keeps egos in check.
• More choices make purchasing decisions harder and less profitable.
• Decision paralyze happens when the number of options passes 6.
• Devil’s advocates are a great way to create much better decisions.
  • Force someone to build a case against a decision.
• Instead of saying why something can’t happen,
  • Pretend that something can happen and focus on what’s needed in order to make it possible.
    • That way you can really see if something can happen or not.
• Ask real questions of people:
  • If interviewing for a job, ask specifics. When did you get home each of the days last week.
  • Ask tough, disconfirming questions.
  • Ask yourself how you can fail by not asking the correct questions.
• Keep a marriage diary where you only write down the positive things your spouse does.
  • Improved 70% of marriages for those who did it.
  • Fights the tendency to pick out the negatives in the person.
• Assume positive intent in your people.
  • Helps to fight negative tendencies.
• Make a deliberate mistake if it has the ability to greatly surprise on the upside.
  • If you lose, you can learn from it still.
• Use a base rate to keep yourself tracked against something else to make better decisions.
• Entrepreneurs are better at prediction, because they generally dismiss predictive data and look for facts.
  • Entrepreneurs favor active testing. They can’t predict the future, so they test for it.
• To avoid interview biases, give people short term contracts to prove themselves.
• Sleep on important decisions.
• Use 10,10,10:
  • How would you feel about your decision in ten minutes, 10 months, and 10 years?
    • Real example: Divorce sucks. She is super stressed. Hormones. Changed way of life.
• When making tough decisions for yourself, pretend you were advising a best friend on the issue.
  • Ends up making a great decision.
    • Real example: don’t get divorced (she is stressed and has a tendency to shut out people).
• How to bias for action: Do first and ask for forgiveness later.
• Before starting a project, have each person write down one way the project could fail.
  • They prepare for each of those scenarios.
• Create tripwires in case you are unsure of a decision.
  • Spend no more than this amount on an idea or startup.
  • Spend no more than this long on a project.