Hey everyone!
I'm trying to get better at decision-making, both at work and in everyday life. Do you have any favorite books, articles, or courses that really helped you make better choices? I'd love any recommendations—whether it's practical tips, interesting frameworks, or just great reads. Thanks in advance!
How to Take Good Decisions?
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Re: How to Take Good Decisions?
#2Bumping it up!
Re: How to Take Good Decisions?
#3Never forget `Pareto', you will find it applies to most of life.
Quote> The Pareto principle (also known as the 80/20 rule, the law of the vital few and the principle of factor sparsity) states that for many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes (the "vital few"). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle
Re: How to Take Good Decisions?
#4For teamwork there are frameworks like DACI https://www.atlassian.com/team-playbook/plays/daci that, along with a low ego, blameless, professional culture can end up helping to make well informed decisions. It can handle a NoSQL vs. Relational type decision as a breeze! The whole team (s) should be involved. It beats the classic talking shop get everyone in a room and someone starts rambling, and you try to solve every itch anyone can think of.
I understand the resistance of developers to such frameworks. Maybe Scrum misuse killed all enthusiasm.
Both inside and outside of work: 5 whys is good.
Think of 1 and 2 way doors. If the decision is reversible it is almost an experiment. Travel for 4 weeks or 12 weeks? Doesn't matter as you can fly home at any point.
Even buying a house is fairly reversible although selling immediately will be costly.
Having children is a one way door. Having dogs or cats is really too (or should be considered as)
Quitting a job may be 1 or 2 way. If you are high level at Google it may be impossible to get back to something like that soon. If you have a regular web dev job you can probably get something like that again if you decide to take time to do something else.
Re: How to Take Good Decisions?
#5Never forget `Pareto', you will find it applies to most of life. Quote> The Pareto principle (also known as the 80/20 rule, the law of the vital few and the principle of factor sparsity) states that for many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes (the "vital few"). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle
This is often misconstrued.
80% of sales come from 20% of the customers > yes, fire the customers who bring in 80% of the work.
80% of goals come from 20% of the players > no, your formation should not change everyone to forwards
Opportunities come 80% from networking, 20% from working hard > if you spend all your time networking, people would avoid you
Very often there's a support structure in place which leads to to the results.
Re: How to Take Good Decisions?
#6Here you go !
https://fs.blog/
It's a very good blog - albeit getting a bit too much 'commercialized' in the last years. The guy also wrote a book, which I found pretty good: https://fs.blog/clear/
That being said, you can read all this stuff, but more importantly - you need to apply it. This is the hard part.
Re: How to Take Good Decisions?
#7There isn’t such a generic skill as “decision making”.
Sorry to disappoint but quality of your decisions grow only proportional to your expertise in some area.
There are adjacent and similar areas, so by getting better at one you improve your decision making in others as well.
But any book that tries to sell you generic “decision making” skill is a piece of garbage.
This is how skills work fundamentally.
Meta-skills cannot be learned, can’t be trained. This is why they are meta
Re: How to Take Good Decisions?
#8[deleted]
Re: How to Take Good Decisions?
#9Here you go ! https://fs.blog/ It's a very good blog - albeit getting a bit too much 'commercialized' in the last years. The guy also wrote a book, which I found pretty good: https://fs.blog/clear/ That being said, you can read all this stuff, but more importantly - you need to apply it. This is the hard part.
Hey Alchmeist,
on the other hand application if done right can give exponential rather than linear results so I completely understand your point...
I liked your response a lot, are there any other such similar resources or videos that you have known about?
Re: How to Take Good Decisions?
#10There isn’t such a generic skill as “decision making”. Sorry to disappoint but quality of your decisions grow only proportional to your expertise in some area. There are adjacent and similar areas, so by getting better at one you improve your decision making in others as well. But any book that tries to sell you generic “decision making” skill is a piece of garbage. This is how skills work fundamentally. Meta-skills…
You can train chess moves and design patterns. There's definitely best practice books like The 33 Strategies of War, Greene. The startup world has lots of these as well - how to discover product market fit, how to run teams, when to hire COOs. Not all advice fits all situations, but having various palettes is handy.