Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg

Author:Charles Duhigg [Duhigg, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 9780812993394
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2016-03-08T07:00:00+00:00

How do we learn to make better decisions? In part, by training ourselves to think probabilistically. To do that, we must force ourselves to envision various futures—to hold contradictory scenarios in our minds simultaneously—and then expose ourselves to a wide spectrum of successes and failures to develop an intuition about which forecasts are more or less likely to come true.

We can develop this intuition by studying statistics, playing games like poker, thinking through life’s potential pitfalls and successes, or helping our kids work through their anxieties by writing them down and patiently calculating the odds. There are numerous ways to build a Bayesian instinct. Some of them are as simple as looking at our past choices and asking ourselves: Why was I so certain things would turn out one way? Why was I wrong?

Regardless of our methods, the goals are the same: to see the future as multiple possibilities rather than one predetermined outcome; to identify what you do and don’t know; to ask yourself, which choice gets you the best odds? Fortune-telling isn’t real. No one can predict tomorrow with absolute confidence. But the mistake some people make is trying to avoid making any predictions because their thirst for certainty is so strong and their fear of doubt too overwhelming.

If Annie had stayed in academics, would any of this have mattered? “Absolutely,” she said. “If you’re trying to decide what job to take, or whether you can afford a vacation, or how much you need to save for retirement, those are all predictions.” The same basic rules apply. The people who make the best choices are the ones who work hardest to envision various futures, to write them down and think them through, and then ask themselves, which ones do I think are most likely and why?

Anyone can learn to make better decisions. We can all train ourselves to see the small predictions we make every day. No one is right every time. But with practice, we can learn how to influence the probability that our fortune-telling comes true.

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