Decisive: How to make better choices in life and work

by Chip Heath

(Find someone who has solved your problem.)

From the perspective of the universe, though, we are utterly typical. And as we’ll see in the next chapter, when our predictions and opinions clash with the universe’s averages, the universe usually wins.

Roger Martin’s brilliant question: “What would have to be true for this option to be the very best choice?”

Zooming out and zooming in gives us a more realistic perspective on our choices. We downplay the overly optimistic pictures we tend to paint inside our minds and instead redirect our attention to the outside world, viewing it in wide-angle and then in close-up.

“When the bosses make the decisions, decisions are made by politics, persuasion, and PowerPoint.” None of those three P’s, Cook notes, ensures that good ideas will triumph.

How will we feel about it 10 minutes from now? How about 10 months from now? How about 10 years from now?

Second, establishing priorities is not the same thing as binding yourself to them. In one series of interviews led by William F. Pounds of MIT, managers were asked to share the important problems they were facing in their organizations. Most managers mentioned five to eight problems. Later in the interview, they were asked to describe their activities from the previous week. Pounds shared the punch line that “no manager reported any activity99 which could be directly associated with the problems he had described.” They’d done no work on their core priorities! Urgencies had crowded out priorities.

5. To carve out space to pursue our core priorities, we must go on the offense against lesser priorities. On the USS Benfold, the crew actively fought the

Advice: (1) Try to “fall in love twice.” Keep searching until you’ve got two really good options. (2) The purpose of multitracking is to let you easily compare and contrast options, which helps you map out the landscape of what’s possible. If incremental options aren’t helping you get smarter, you’ve probably done enough. Call off the search for more. (3) Be careful not to collect so many options that you don’t have the time or resources to “reality-test” them. (For example, the aspiring home buyer will need to limit her serious options to about 4 to 7 homes rather than 30, just because of logistical reality.) (4) If one of your options doesn’t have any advocates, drop it from contention. (Or, if it’s a personal decision, discard any option that never seems to cycle to the top of your mental wish list.)