3 Simple & Powerful Mental Habits That You Can Use Today to Make Better Decisions
⌠but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes decisions.
âBenjamin Franklin, in a letter to Jean-Baptiste Leroy, 1789. (Well, edited by me.)
Should you hire Bob to lead your team that's developing some key company features?
Should you take the higher paying job in the Bay Area, or stick around in the midwest where your friends are?
Should you host your infrastructure for your web application on EC2? Ruby on Rails or Scala with Play? Hadoop or Spark?
Our daily lives are chock full of decisions -- everything from the minutiae of deciding what to eat for lunch to the important decisions that ultimately determine the fate your venture. Whether you're involved in a business, art, or the scientific community, or anything for that matter -- decisions are the unavoidable human certainties that inundate us day in and day out. Â Â
The consequences of the decisions that we make today are felt like ripples into the future, and itâs becoming more clear that  errors in decisions can be extremely costly. For example, Tony Hsieh of Zappos once estimated that bad hires cost the company over $100 million! Imagine if that could be avoided; Iâm sure Tony would have leapt at the opportunity.
What can we do to avoid bad decisions and make good ones? Is it possible to make better decisions? The decision making literature over the past few decades is full of indictments of our intuitive judgements. The biases built into our brain cleverly point out the frailty of our evolved hardware.
Luckily, frailty and potential are two sides of the same coin. We happen to live in an age where the torch of science has illuminated at least part of the way, and itâs extremely exciting.
So, without further ado, here are three science backed and battle tested techniques to make better decisions and reduce your errors.
1. Consider the opposite
Letâs say I spin a giant Wheel of Fortune, and it comes up with the number 65. I then ask you: what is the percentage of African countries that are members of the United Nations? What would you say?
Interestingly, scientists have found that when presented with this scenario, the median estimate for people who saw â65â from the wheel was 45%. The median estimate of the percentage of African countries in the UN for subjects who saw â10â on the wheel was 25%. How can these be so different?
The theory here is that when we make estimates, we start off with an anchor and then adjust up or down from that. When people are primed with a random anchor, their estimates are totally different! Now, imagine the implications for things we estimate in daily life, such as negotiating a job offer salary or haggling with a car salesman.
Scientists have found that we can do better on this type of task by simply considering the opposite. In an experiment similar to the wheel of the fortune test, scientists found that just pausing to consider something opposing your first reaction consistently reduces this anchoring bias. Whatâs more is that this effect is additive -- the more you do it, the better you are at avoiding this bias (and many others! there have been numerous follow up studies testing a wide variety of biases that all succumb to this simple tactic).
This mental habit is very simple and extremely powerful: when faced with a decision, simply considering the opposite of the first thing that pops into your head has been shown to reduce a wide class of errors.
2. Take the view of an outsider
Whenâs the last time you promised your manager that something would take a week  -- and it actually took 2 weeks? Have you ever been stuck in the quicksand of a problem that it feels like you arenât making any progress?
If you have, thereâs a simple mental habit that can help. Itâs called âtaking the outside view.â Imagine youâre an alien looking in at what youâre trying to do, and derive your estimates from that. For example, instead of planning out the length of a project by looking at the individual steps, look at how long these types of projects have taken in the past.
In software development, this technique sometimes goes under the alias of "rubber duck debugging": if youâre stuck on a problem, take some time to explain it to a rubber duck. People have reported experiencing that âAHAâ moment while doing this. This is also why itâs so valuable to bounce your ideas off of other people (or a rubber duck).
This simple technique is so general and applicable that you can use it with every decision you make. Writers such as Robert Greene even believe that this technique is part of the equation for creativity, and that every great innovator brings an outsiderâs mind to a problem. Â
3. Change your context
Research suggests that our first response when faced with a decision is very gut based, and that simply changing your context can help make better decisions. This can be something as simple as standing up when youâve been sitting for hours, or making decisions when the consequences are still far off. Even going for a walk every hour or so can be extremely helpful.
Anecdotally, when I was in school, I used to do the final edits to my humanities papers in the dusty stacks of the campus library, surrounded by the pages of knowledge written by my forebears. This environmental context was a welcome alternative to finishing my papers under the fluorescent lights of the computer lab, where I used to bang out first drafts.
So there you have it. Simply taking a moment to consider the opposite of what pops into your head, or taking the perspective of an outsider to the problem, or just changing contexts can help you make better decisions.
Go forth, ye mighty, and conquer!
⌠and if youâre interested in delving into the science behind these habits, check the sources below.
-- Girish Sastry, Software Engineer, Iterable
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