Designing Your New Work Life: How to Thrive and Change and Find Happiness--and a New Freedom--at Work

by Bill Burnett

He made the best decision with the information available. He shouldn’t beat himself up because it turns out that some important information was withheld on purpose. Ron Howard, the Stanford professor who is considered the father of decision analysis, says, “Never confuse the quality of a decision with the quality of the outcome—they are really two different things. The only thing you can control is the quality of your research and the quality of the resulting decision.”

To feel like your work is working for you, the science says you have to be learning something every day. So notice every day what you learn.

By savoring we simply mean returning to an experience or thought and reentering and re-remembering it. You do this in a setting where you can give it your full attention, somewhere quiet and comfortable. You participate in the reflection at your own pace, via memory and imagination.

Think about it. Despite many layers of complexity, lots of times there aren’t infinite versions of possible solutions to your problem. And by taking a bias-to-action approach, you get unstuck, make a decision, and move into your future—a future that you chose instead of one that would eventually be chosen for you by inaction. When you get good at recognizing your BDOs, you get good at making actionable choices and are the designer of your future.

The trick here is to remind yourself that you’re going for the Best Doable Option (BDO), which is not the same as the Best Theoretical Option (BTO).

When you’re distracted by the idea of the BTO, all the BDOs—the things you can actually do, like ordering kung pao chicken or a Philly cheesesteak sandwich—seem like a compromise. They’re all “settling,” and you don’t want to settle. But you aren’t actually settling, because an option that doesn’t exist in reality isn’t an option—it’s just an idea.

What we’ve learned over the years of working with people is that anchor problems are often about fear. Rather than trying something new and maybe failing, it is sometimes more comfortable to hold on to our familiar, impossible-to-solve problem—our anchor. The inaccessibility of that preferred solution is a great place to hide. We may not get what we want, but at least we didn’t have to confront our fear of failure.