Make Decisions At 70%

Now more than ever, we are tasked to make so many decisions in any given day. Decisions about different things to do, options to select between, what’s worth our attention and what’s a distraction… And it wears us down leading to fatigue, paralysis, and added difficulty to navigating life.

Last week I heard a perspective on this from my good friend, Kate Manser. She’s an unbelievable speaker, author, coach and leader of the You Might Die Tomorrow movement. I co-hosted a live session with her for my coaching community and she shared a powerful principle: “You need to aim for 60-70% certainty when making a decision.”

This makes perfect sense when you go to the extreme of 100% certainty. What would need to happen in order to be 100% certain about something? Life is notoriously unpredictable making 100% certainty basically impossible. But what about 95%, 90%, 85% certainty… What needs to happen to get to that point?

In short, it requires more thought, more research, and more energy, often to the point where it offers diminishing returns. As you’re trying to think your way into higher levels of certainty, you don’t get anywhere near as much out as you put in. And the reason is, all of that extra effort is theoretical. It’s limited by your understanding of how you think things will transpire when you choose different unknown paths.?

That’s why the fastest way to increase certainty is to get practical feedback. To make a decision and observe what actually happens. There’s no way to predict reality like experiencing reality. The insight you can extract from something that tangibly happens is unquestionably more informative than continuing to think more about what might happen.??

Let’s take the example of making a putt in golf, and let’s say you’re 70% certain that it’s going to break 9 inches to the left. On one hand, you can take an extra 5 minutes to evaluate every factor including the wind, the dampness of the green, etc. Or you could just hit the putt once and see what happens.

But in the case of playing a round of golf, you don’t have the luxury of a second try. The first one is the only one that counts. But even so, what often happens beyond seeking 70% certainty is you stop using the most impactful details and get biased by minor details, which could skew your overall understanding of the shot. This creates a higher likelihood that you get a bad result.

In Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Blink” he talks about the sharpness of our intuition through a process called “thin slicing”, and how we can think our way out of the right decision if we take too many unimportant factors into consideration.

And ultimately, many of us hesitate to make big decisions in our life because we fear that we’re going to make the wrong one.? It’s embarrassing to look back and realize we made a mistake… And as we make decisions on the direction of our businesses, what events to attend, travel plans to book, people to invest more time in, we want to be thoughtful about our choices.

But the truth is, most decisions are reversible. It’s not that you only have one chance to hit a putt, you get many. So the fastest way to know how things work, and to be set up for success, is to make decisions sooner so that you can get practical feedback faster. So don’t put too much pressure on yourself... And give yourself the space for trial and error.

I don’t normally do this, but if you want to watch this hour-long, very powerful session I hosted for my Coaching Community featuring Kate and her take on Decision Making With Urgency And Meaning, particularly through the lens of our own mortality...

You can watch it here!