Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

by Chip Heath

“A remarkable aspect of your mental life is that you are rarely stumped,”

“what you see is all there is.”

“spotlight”

(Think of the way a spotlight in a theater directs our attention; what’s inside the spotlig...

why not change his role to match up better with his strengths?

What if she is a terrible manager?

When we begin shifting the spotlight from side to side, the situation starts to look very different.

spotlight sh...

What’s in the spotlight will rarely be everything we need to make a good decision,

we won’t always remember to shift the light.

Sometimes, in fact, we’ll forget there’s a spotlight at all, dwelling so long in the tiny circle of light that we forget ...

Career choices, for instance, are often abandoned or regretted.

teacher was almost two times more likely to drop out than a student.

83% failed to create any value for shareholders.

Middle-aged people let work interfere with their family lives.

our guts when we make important decisions. Unfortunately, our guts are full of questionable advice.

61,535 tattoos were reversed in the United States in 2009.

Many business-people put their faith in careful analysis.

1,048 business decisions over five years, tracking both the ways the decisions were made and the subsequent outcomes in terms of revenues, profits, and market share. The decisions were important ones, such as whether or not to launch a new product or service, change the structure of the organization, enter a new country, or acquire another firm.

the teams had conducted rigorous analysis. They’d compiled thorough financial

models and a...

how investors might react to their pla...

“process mattered more than analysis—by a factor of six.”

arguing only one side of the case.

A better decision process substantially improves the results of the decisions, as well as the financial returns associated with them.

The discipline exhibited by good corporate decision makers—exploring alternative points of view, recognizing uncertainty, searching for evidence that contradicts

their beli...

The only decision-making process in wide circulation is the pros-and-cons list.

it’s deliberative.

hunt for both positive and negative factors—pushing the spotlight around—until we felt...

“moral algebra.”

may not follow Franklin’s advice about crossing off pros and cons of similar weight, but we embrace the gist of the process.

identified a set of biases in our thinking that doom the pros-and-cons model of decision making.

Prepare to encounter the four most pernicious villains of decision making—and

“Any

time in life you’re tempted to think, ‘Should I do this OR that?’ instead, ask yourself, ‘Is there a way I can do this AND that?’ It’s surprisingly frequent that it’s feasible to do both things.”

narrow framing, which is the tendency to define our choices too narrowly, to see them in binary terms.

spotlighted

because pros and cons are generated in our heads, it is very, very easy for us to bias the factors.

brains are following orders from our guts.

normal habit in life is to develop a quick belief about a situation and then seek out informati...

“confirmation...

people have the opportunity to collect information from the world, they are more likely to select information that supports their preexisting attitudes, beliefs, and actions.

Political partisans seek out media outlets that support their side