The Weekly Spark #7: “Contrary to popular belief, winners quit a lot. That’s how they win.” Annie Duke

“You?take the blue pill?- the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe.?You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.” This morning I was struggling to make a decision on how to introduce the topic. I had so many ideas and thoughts flowing in my head and then this iconic scene from The Matrix popped in my head – Morpheus prompting Neo to make a decision that would ultimately change the course of his life and the one of the entire humanity. I hope you’ve understood by now that today’s post is about…making decisions!

Last week we closed the blog with a point on making important decisions, so I thought today it would’ve been nice to expand on this topic.

We all take decisions, every single day – from simple ones, like drinking a glass of water, to more complex decisions. And it’s clear that in the fast-paced world of business we often find ourselves having to make many decisions in a single day, risking to go into what is known as “decision-making overload” (i.e. that indecisive fog that can lead you to stare at your computer screen for 10 minutes without knowing what you have to do). This is why many leaders had to find extreme solutions to drastically prioritize and reduce the number of decisions they take in a day: Mark Zuckerberg always wearing the same trademark uniform, or Jeff Bezos who makes a maximum of 3 decisions per day. ????

Making a decision is a choice. You do it on purpose. Not making a decision is actually the same. It’s a choice.

Here are my 3 key principles of decision making inspired by Seth Godin:

1) Good decisions don’t always lead to good outcomes, they merely lead to the best outcome being the most likely outcome.

2) Falling in love and being attached to the outcome of our decision doesn’t make the decision easier or the outcome more likely to occur.

3) The decision you made yesterday or last month is irrelevant to today’s decision. It doesn’t matter how difficult the decision was or how much it cost you. It happened yesterday. It wasn’t made by you–it was made by a previous version of you, and the result is a gift from old you to new you.

A clear example to outline the above 3 principles can be: if you spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in school to become a dentist and after 10 years you hate being a dentist, it’s appropriate to make a life change and stop being a dentist.

Here is a simple framework that can help you to simplify the decision-making process.

1) Commit to making a decision, including deciding whether or not you need to make a decision, and what the benefit is of deciding now.

2) Frame it generously: what is the real problem we are seeking to solve? (this is the most important step and it’s fundamental to define it correctly or else the next 3 steps will ultimately be wrong).

3) Ask, “what is this for?” and define what success looks like.

4) Organize your priorities and calculate the expected value of the decisions.

5) Make the decision.

I believe there is so much stuff here that deserves a deep dive in the coming weeks, but what I want to leave you with is the concept that you will not always make the decisions that will produce the best outcome, and you will most likely hear an internal or external voice that says “I told you!” (because everyone is a master at taking past decisions!). Nevertheless focus on how taking that decision makes you feel and how does it increase the chances that you will achieve your long-term goals…or else, if you don’t want to think, you can ask ChatGPT.

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