Decisive

• Narrow framing: the tendency to define our choices too narrowly, to see them in binary terms.
• Confirmation bias: we are more likely to select the information that supports our preexisting attitudes, beliefs, and actions.
• Short-term emotion: when we’ve got a difficult decision to make, our feelings churn.
• Over-confidence: we think they know more than they do about how the future will unfold.

It describes the process that “wraps” around your usual way of making decisions, helping to protect you from some of the villains and biases related to decision making:

• Widen your options.
• Reality-test your assumptions.
• Attain distance before deciding.
• Prepare to be wrong.

Focusing is great for analyzing alternatives but terrible for spotting them. Think about the visual analogy—when we focus we sacrifice peripheral vision. And there’s no natural corrective for this; life won’t interrupt our focus to draw our attention to all of our options.

Multitracking involves considering several options simultaneously. Multitracking has another advantage too, one that is more unexpected. It feels better.

When you consider multiple options simultaneously, you learn the shape of the problem. To get the benefits of multitracking, we need to produce options that are meaningfully distinct.

Psychologists have identified two contrasting mindsets that affect our motivation and our receptiveness to new opportunities: a ‘prevention focus,’ which orients us toward avoiding negative outcomes, and a ‘promotion focus,’ which orients us toward pursuing positive outcomes.

One of the reliable but unrecognized pillars of scientific thinking is the analogy (...) When you use analogies—when you find someone who has solved your problem—you can take your pick from the world’s buffet of solutions.

• Studies found that the confirmation bias was stronger in emotion-laden domains such as religion or politics and also when people had a strong underlying motive to believe one way or the other.
• Confirmation bias increases when people have previously invested a lot of time or effort in a given issue.
• Confirmation bias doesn’t just affect what information we seek, but also what we notice in the first place.

Reality-test the assumptions you’re making by developing the discipline to consider the opposite of our initial instincts. That discipline begins with a willingness to spark constructive disagreement.

Sometimes we think we’re gathering information when we’re actually fishing for support.

• The inside view = our evaluation of our specific situation.
• The outside view = how things generally unfold in situations like ours.

The outside view is more accurate, but most people gravitate toward the inside view.

To use 10/10/10, think about your decisions on three different time frames: How will I feel about it 10 minutes from now? How about 10 months from now? How about 10 years from now?

Conducting a 10/10/10 analysis doesn’t presuppose that the long-term perspective is the right one. It simply ensures that short-term emotion isn’t the only voice at the table.

Our decisions are often altered by two subtle short-term emotions: (1) mere exposure: we like what’s familiar to us; and (2) loss aversion: losses are more painful than gains are pleasant.

The future is not a “point”—a single scenario that we must predict. It is a range. We should bookend the future, considering a range of outcomes from very bad to very good.