Optimize Your Decision Making Today!

Americans have always placed great emphasis on individual choice. From where to live and what job to take to what time to wake up. Americans desire more choice than many other nationalities. However, even with American standards, overall people have had a “choice” explosion over the past 30 years. Americans now have more choices over more things than any other culture in human history.

As I read in 2004 in Barry Schwartz’s book, “The Paradox of Choice”, more choices is not necessarily good. Actually the more choices we have, the less we want to make a choice as we are more likely to find it more difficult with “too many options” so we are less likely to make the “best choice” that will make us happier. Barry does a great job dividing people into groups, the “satisficers” vs “maximizers”. Satisficers is a pragmatic individual who makes decisions based on meeting requirements in a timely manner, finding the “good enough” solution and moving on while maximizers set high standards during decision making and will aim for them but are often disappointed when they fail to achieve them, dwelling on what they have missed out on rather than what they have.

So the satisficers tend to be happier than maximizers because of regrets. Is there really such thing as “the best”? First, people who want the best tend to be prone to regret and then the idea of the best is preposterous. There is no best anything.

“Good enough is the best!” said Rosanna.

Ok, so back to the plethora and overwhelming number of choices we have nowadays. Making decisions well is incredibly difficult, even for executive professional decision makers. We need to learn to decide well. Decision making is a skill we can improve by developing the techniques of self-distancing to counteract the flaws in our own mental machinery. Here is one:

Suzy Welch’s 10-10-10 Rule. When you are about to make a decision, ask yourself how you will feel about it in 10 minutes, 10 months, and 10 years. people can be overly biased by the immediate pain of choices but they can put the short term pain in long term perspective by asking these questions.

Sometimes making a “deliberate” mistake can be helpful in learning what you really want because many of us do not know what we really want. As a result of not knowing, we apply filters that may be hindering us from getting what we truly want. An example is going out to dinner with someone who is not your “normal” type or in college taking a class in a subject you haven’t before or isn’t what you “think” you may like.

We have a tendency to “narrow-frame” and see decisions as binary “whether or not” instead of stepping back and looking for alternatives that are more of the gray area and a blend of the black and white binary choices. Instead of yes or no, think outside of those 2 choices. Self awareness and choice awareness. Keep an open mind, be flexible, and perceptive.

With this massive explosion in choices and options, we all need more help understanding the decision making process and how we can optimize these skills to improve our lives.