Decisive Quotes

“By identifying and enshrining your core priorities, you make it easier to resolve present and future dilemmas.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“Confirmation bias = hunting for information that confirms our initial assumptions (which are often self-serving).”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“Widen Your Options. Reality-Test Your Assumptions. Attain Distance Before Deciding. Prepare to Be Wrong.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“• You encounter a choice. But narrow framing makes you miss options.     • You analyze your options. But the confirmation bias leads you to gather self-serving information.     • You make a choice. But short-term emotion will often tempt you to make the wrong one.     • Then you live with it. But you’ll often be overconfident about how the future will unfold.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“process mattered more than analysis—by a factor of six.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“In fact, one study in Philadelphia schools found that a teacher was almost two times more likely to drop out than a student.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“Kahneman says that we are quick to jump to conclusions because we give too much weight to the information that’s right in front of us, while failing to consider the information that’s just offstage. He called this tendency “what you see is all there is.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“Thinking, Fast and Slow”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“more”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“Not cocky overconfidence that comes from collecting biased information and ignoring uncertainties, but the real confidence that comes from knowing you’ve made the best decision that you could.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“Seeking out one more option. Finding someone else who’s solved our problem. Asking, “What would have to be true for you to be right?” Ooching as a way to dampen politics. Making big decisions based on core priorities. Running premortems and preparades. Laying down tripwires. Using these techniques will improve the results of your group decisions.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“tripwires allow us the certainty of committing to a course of action, even a risky one, while minimizing the costs of overconfidence.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“Deadlines focus our mental spotlight on a choice. They grab us by the collar and say, If you’re gonna do this, you have to do it now.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“a technique called “failure mode and effect analysis” (FMEA), a precursor to the premortem that has been used for decades in the military and government.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“prospective hindsight” to work backward from a certain future—they are better at generating explanations for why the event might happen.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“The problem is that urgencies—the most vivid and immediate circumstances—will always hog our spotlight.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“researchers have found again and again that people act as though losses are from two to four times more painful than gains are pleasurable.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“Compounding this preference for the status quo is another bias called loss aversion, which says that we find losses more painful than gains are pleasant.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“TO OOCH IS TO ask, Why predict something we can test? Why guess when we can know?”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“Sometimes we think we’re gathering information when we’re actually fishing for support.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“What would have to be true for this option to be the right answer?”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“THE DOWNSIDE OF PROVOKING disagreement is that it can curdle into bitter politics.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“The most important lesson to learn about devil’s advocacy isn’t the need for a formal contrarian position; it’s the need to interpret criticism as a noble function.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“To make better decisions, use the WRAP process: Widen Your Options. Reality-Test Your Assumptions. Attain Distance Before Deciding. Prepare to Be Wrong.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“Thinking, Fast and Slow, mentioned above, and Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational. One of the handful of books that provides advice on making decisions better is Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, which was written for “choice architects” in business and government who construct decision systems such as retirement plans or organ-donation policies. It has been used to improve government policies in the United States, Great Britain, and other countries.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“Smart enough to get into Yale. Economists studied students who had been admitted to two schools of higher and lower prestige but decided to attend the school with lower prestige. Estimated sacrifice in lifetime earnings from attending the less prestigious school: none.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“Kahneman says that we are quick to jump to conclusions because we give too much weight to the information that’s right in front of us, while failing to consider the information that’s just offstage.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“That’s why the initial slowness of bargaining may be offset by a critical advantage: It speeds up implementation. The superintendent can make a lightning-fast decision if she makes it autocratically, but if her administrators and teachers hate it, then adoption will come to a standstill.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“Compromise is like the old joke, “A camel is a horse made by a committee.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“The discovery of Viagra was a similar story. Initially, the drug had been tested as a treatment for chest pain (angina), and for that purpose it was a failure. Then patients started reporting a curious side effect. (Imagine those awkward conversations: “Doc, my chest still hurts … but, um, I’ve been noticing an effect somewhere else …”)”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work