A maker of good decisions or a good decision maker?
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I don’t want to make good decisions. I want to be a good decision maker. There’s a subtle but important difference.
The problem with making good decisions is it tempts us to judge whether it was “good” based on results instead of the process.
Picture a deck of cards with all the red cards removed except for the queen of hearts. I shuffle it and ask you to choose black or red. If the top card is that color you get R1,000.
It’s decision time.
Imagine you choose red. If we stop there and evaluate the decision, we would have to say it’s terrible. But life doesn’t stop. We eventually get to see the top card.
Sometimes the top card will be the queen of hearts. Did your decision suddenly become good? Most of us would say “no you just got lucky”.
In real life the odds are not as clear. We play multiple games at once and they can take months or even years. We often don’t even know all the rules.
In a complex world it’s easier to wait for the top card to be revealed and say “Great decision!”
But if you want to do well over the long run then you must evaluate decisions based only on the information available at the time you made it.
If we change our minds based purely on outcomes then we learn the wrong lesson and our future decisions become worse.
Picture a deck of cards with all the red cards removed except for the queen of hearts. I shuffle it and ask you to choose black or red. If the top card is that color you get R1,000.
It’s decision time.
Imagine you choose red. If we stop there and evaluate the decision, we would have to say it’s terrible. But life doesn’t stop. We eventually get to see the top card.
Sometimes the top card will be the queen of hearts. Did your decision suddenly become good? Most of us would say “no you just got lucky”.
In real life the odds are not as clear. We play multiple games at once and they can take months or even years. We often don’t even know all the rules.
In a complex world it’s easier to wait for the top card to be revealed and say “Great decision!”
But if you want to do well over the long run then you must evaluate decisions based only on the information available at the time you made it.
If we change our minds based purely on outcomes then we learn the wrong lesson and our future decisions become worse.