Decisive
The four principles that can help us to overcome our brains' natural biases to make better, more informed decisions – in our lives, careers, families and organizations. In Decisive, Chip Heath and Dan Heath, the bestselling authors of Made to Stick and Switch, tackle the thorny problem of how to overcome our natural biases and irrational thinking to make better decisions, about our work, lives, companies and careers.
Stats for nerds
6recommend
9mentions
6people
2014–2022years
89% recommend11% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- highly recommend a few books if you haven't read them yet. plenty of of ideas to steal from there:
from "Decisive: How to make better choices in life and work" https://www.amazon.com/Decisive-Make-Better-Choices-Life/dp/..., you might be presenting a false choice at the top. Is there a feature to prompt people to propose alternative paths?
from "How to Decide" https://www.amazon.com/How-Decide-Simple-Making-Choices/dp/0..., can you add a feature to list options and assign probability and cost weightings? (essentially risk/probability/impact scoring)
- The book that immediately sprang to mind is one I hesitated to share here, and will only devote a paragraph to. It is "The Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ". I believe it truly is a record of God's dealings with men, and have changed my life to live according to what it teaches.
Now, onto the sorts of books you were more likely looking for, although most of these have only changed my perspective, and not my day-to-day:
- "The Collapse of Chaos: Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World" by Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart (1995). The most mind-blowing thought was that if you, say, accurately simulate an atom, and then build molecules out of it, then, while the atoms are fake, the molecules are real/true/useful.
- http://worrydream.com has presentations and essays by Bret Victor on using the computer to augment what humans can think and accomplish. Everything here is good; "Up and down the ladder of abstraction" talks about seeing a problem at different levels. "Stop drawing dead fish" discusses creating interactive simulations by drawing. "The humane representation of thought" discusses how knowledge work has been constrained to rectangles and we should move beyond it and engage our whole bodies.
- I highly recommend all the books by Dan and Chip Heath. "Decisive" is on making decisions. "Upstream" is on solving root problems, and not just symptoms. "Made to Stick" is about spreading ideas and having them be remembered.
- "Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error" by Kathryn Schulz—looks like she's also done some Ted talks—talks about how we can be deceived and why we are wrong in so many domains. Similarly, "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion" by Jonathan Haidt was very interesting as it suggests why people understand the world so differently. By analogy, imagine that we all have five taste receptors on our tongues, but some people use different ones to inform what they like. Fascinating.
- "Younger Next Year for Women: Live Strong, Fit, Sexy, and Smart—Until You're 80" by Chris Crowley and Henry Lodge. I don't fit the categories the book is for, but saw it on my library shelves, and it applies to everyone. It maintains that your body is either growing or dying, and you need to put time in every day getting your heart rate up if you want to live a full and healthy life.
- "Growing Up with Lucy: How to Build an Android in Twenty Easy Steps" by Steve Grand. Written before GPU-powered machine learning, this book, by the programmer behind the "Creatures" series of games, gives interesting insight into artificial life.
I'm certain there are lots of good books I've read that I'm not recalling at the moment.
- An even better (or possibly the same, I'm just restating you more verbosely) recommendation would be one which gave you a mental framework to help you organize your thoughts around the situation so that you can be confident in exercising your own judgment.
Books which are good for helping lay out such a mental framework include:
- https://www.amazon.co.uk/Decisive-How-Make-Better-Decisions/...
- https://www.amazon.co.uk/Too-Good-Leave-Bad-Stay/dp/07181417...
- I found the following books presented useful mental models:
- Thinking Fast and Slow
- Decisive by Chip & Dan Heath
- Thanks for the Feedback
- Difficult Conversations
- Book recommendation: Decisive by Chip & Dan Heath
Its a book about how to make better decisions more confidently, both as an individual and as a group. It has a clear framework that presents actionble tips and exercises you can apply in situations. The writing style is a good mix of explanation and anecdotes and is fairly readable.
More general book recommendation: Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. It presents a mental model of how to understand your existing reasoning and perception processes.
Also, if you're having trouble making a choice, consider messaging a friend and asking them "hey, I'm trying to make a heavy life decision. Can I take you out to dinner and just talk out my thoughts with you?" Try to be clear about how much you want them to just listen, how much you want them to help you clarify your own thoughts, and how much you want them to give you recommendations.
- As you make your decision, you might want to consider applying the WARP decision framework from Decisive by Chip & Dan Heath[0]:
1. Widen your options
2. Reality-test your assumptions
3. Attain distance before deciding
4. Prepare to be wrong
The heath brothers offer a useful workbook[1] that goes into details for each of these steps. It might be worthwhile to go through it as you decide.
[0] http://heathbrothers.com/books/decisive/
[1] http://heathbrothers.com/ot/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/HBDWB...
