Ask HN: How do you make life's decisions?

[codesternews]

Hi HN,

I felt I am very poor at making decisions. I have made very poor decisions in past.

I felt I left things till last moment and unable to make decisions. I fear a lot about what will be good for me and unable to make decisions.

Please advice me.

[veddox]

There's a couple of rules that I have been following, more or less consciously, for the past few years:

1) Seek advice from people you respect.

2) Don't let fear take your decisions for you: Will you regret (not) doing this?

3) If you're thinking about taking a risk: How bad is the worst-case scenario, and how likely is it? Even if it's bad: Would it be worse not to have tried?

4) Think through your options carefully, but recognize that for many decisions, you will never reach absolute certainty. Learn to live with the concept of sufficient certainty.

5) Take a decision and run with it. Don't keep second-guessing yourself. Learn from your mistakes, but don't beat yourself up about them, especially if they were only evident in hindsight.

[afarrell]

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.

[technobabble]

Disclaimer: Annecdotal answer, your mileage may vary.

If it's a bigger decision. I assign two decisions to the flip of a coin. The actual outcome doesn't matter. Instead, pay attention to your reaction to the coin flip.

[perilunar]

  “Whenever you're called on to make up your mind,
  and you're hampered by not having any,
  the best way to solve the dilemma, you'll find, 
  is simply by spinning a penny.
  No - not so that chance shall decide the affair
  while you're passively standing there moping; 
  but the moment the penny is up in the air,
  you suddenly know what you're hoping. ” 
  ― Piet Hein

[jonathanyc]

This is how I decided where to go to college :)

I think one reason this "works" is that by the time I've gotten to the point where I'm willing to decide based on a coin flip I've normally saturated myself with as much information and argument as I can expect to get. If I'm still on the fence, that probably means that even if the end the decision is very high stakes, I probably have judged the two choices about equal.

[hvass]

I second reading Decisive.

If I were in your shoes, I'd do the following:

1) Sit down and write down your "poor" decisions. How could you have prevented them? What information was missing? Could you have known this piece of information in advance if you sought it out? Some of this will help you unpack how much it's you and how much it's situational.

2) Ask your friends about your decision-making style and ask for blunt feedback.

3) Ask yourself how much you should have listened to other people vs how much to yourself? You might need to calibrate your ego/confidence--you might be too trusting (or not trusting enough of yourself)

--

For future decisions,

1) Try to make them rationally and not out of emotions. This is tricky because you have to trust your gut, but your gut can be just fear and anxiety.

2) Most important thing: How reversible is a decision? What is the downside? What is the upside? Never, ever make a decision that has a chance of ruin.

3) Always ask: How is this decision wrong? Always be able to articulate for each option what are the downsides. No decision is perfect but you have to be able to weigh the downsides, and also see the problematic aspects of each. This is critical if you fall in love with one answer to a fork on the road.

Hope this helps! And do read Decisive!

[ytNumbers]

Since you feel you have poor judgement, I recommend you try these steps: 1) Find some smart friends. 2) When you need to make an important decision, ask your smart friends for advice. 3) When multiple smart people are giving you essentially the same advice, take their advice.

When it comes to advice, "Wise men don't need it, and fools won't heed it. And those who want it the most like it the least."

[veddox]

Yes, yes, yes! Taking advice is incredibly important, and a trusted circle of advisors absolutely invaluable. And don't only include your own buddies in this circle: Reach out to older people and ask them about their experiences. Why repeat the same mistakes the previous generation made?

Just one thing in your comment I strongly disagree with: "Wise men don't need [advice]" In my experience, the wisest people I know are the ones most often asking for advice... Or, as King Solomon put it: "The way of a fool is right in his own eyes, but a wise man listens to advice." (Proverbs 12:15)

[phakding]

Take a decision. If that turned out to be a good decision, think back and remember how you took that decision. If it turned out to be a bad decision, remember how you took that decision. Learn from your mistakes and soon you will be an expert decision maker.

[wsc981]

For me, I regard my life kind of like a business. As such I have a strategic, tactical and operational plan. These plans operate on different schedules. My strategic, long term plan is where I picture myself in perhaps the next 10-15 years. My tactical plan is where I picture myself in about a year. And my operational plan dictates my day-to-day actions. Occasionally (perhaps a few times a week) I reflect on my long term plans.

In the end life never really works out as planned, but as some wiseguy once said "Plans are worthless, but planning is everything." You kind of have to be ready to adapt or change your plan.

To give a more concrete example: for the last 10 or 15 years I've been thinking about emigration. Initially my eyes were kind of set to South America. Chile seemed kind of interesting. So I was kind of orienting myself to moving there are some point. Still it seemed hard, but at least there was some goal to work towards.

Then about 5 years ago I got a chance to freelance. Freelancing in my country when working in IT means earning much more money and having more control over your spending. During this time I also started to have this dream of working for myself one day, working on my own projects.

After 2 or 3 years of freelancing I met a Thai woman in The Netherlands. Through her I got some interest in Thailand and Thai culture. This caused me to go on holiday in Thailand. In Thailand I met my current girlfriend and I decided I would take a sabbatical there, so I could experience how I would enjoy life when living for a longer time in Thailand. The freelancing allowed me to build up quite some savings so this wasn't an issue for me. And I could work on my own projects as well.

This was a very enjoyable time and I decided I would emigrate to Thailand. With my girlfriend I've got a daughter now and we've also built a house recently. As it stands now it seems I will emigrate to Thailand in June. I've also worked on getting a remote job. I am hoping I will only have to do part time remote work and can focus more and more on my own projects. And hopefully in the future dedicate myself on working full-time on my own projects, provided they give me income or I can build up enough savings to have a decent living on the profits. I believe this should be achievable in maybe the next 5 years.

Most important decisions I made in the last years were all guided by my plans (and most importantly my long term plan). I believe people need to have these kind of plans to make good decisions for their life. From what I've seen, people that don't have a long term plan for their life, they just seem to live day to day without a clear purpose.

[kleer001]

Your life may be too messy. Probably start with cleaning your room up and going from there. Good luck, be brave!

[ManlyBread]

What's up with this kind of non-advice always being the highest scored answer? It's not even an issue with HN, I see this behavior all over the internet.

[bsvalley]

You need to know your ultimate/achievable goals in life, then you need to list them on a piece of paper. It sounds so obvious but that is where it all begins. The order may be important but that’s where the trick is. So, it feels like you keep making bad decisions in life? Well, now that you’re aware of most of your big goals, it’s time for you to learn how to visualize things ahead of time and how to connect these goals all together in a bunch of different orders. Remember, you’re chasing that list of big goals. This alone will help you focus a lot more and will force you to look beyond short term thinking. Life is there to trick you by telling you to do a lot of weird things. Go to college, pay your bills on a monthly basis, get married before you get old, go move to these expensive places for better jobs opportunities, etc. It requires you to re-prioratize things, to think long term, to be able to work backwards towards a global solution. You’re like a Chef working at a 5 star restaurant trying to create a new menu. You have the ability to create amazing receipes with a bunch of unexpected ingredients. The order matters sometimes but most of the time, it’s just in your head. If an unexcpected event happens, try to fall back into that original list of ultimate goals. Re-think on how your new/current situation could lead you to your goals. Who knows? Maybe on day you’ll learn something new. You will want to add a complete new goal to your list. But before doing so, you need to look how it fits with the existing goals... is it breaking certain milestones? Then maybe you need to re-prioritize, remove old goals, etc. Or maybe it’s just a short term thing which gets you excited in the moment...

For example, let’s say you want to have a lot of money, no boss, you want to be married, have kids, awesome friends and a big house by the beach. You hate your current job and you have a 30 year mortgage. You’re single looking for someone but you’re not confident enough to go talk to girls because you feel like you’re a below average guy. You just lost your job because the company you believed in originally went out of business. You are forced to sell your house. What does it mean? Chaos? Hmm... pull out your list of ultimate goals and take a look at it. See? Your house was not by the beach, you were a slave to the system so you had lost your freedom and flexibility to accomplish your remaining goals. So that chaos would look more like an amazing opportunity to re-group and to take a turn towards your real goals. Move places, go to another country. Let’s say you live in the US, go to thailand for example by the beach. It’s cheaper.. you’ll be a foreigner over there so you will jump from being below average in your current circle to being exotic. Special, noticeable, etc. I will stop the story here.

Bad choices are for those who forget that roads are all interconnected.