My Learning on Decision Making

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Do you get stuck on choices—big and small? Do you get paralyzed by too many options? Do you believe waiting for the perfect answer is safe, when in reality, indecision is actually the riskiest path? Let’s level up! Decision-making is not a mysterious art, but a learnable habit. Business consultants & corporates rely tools and frameworks. I gained simple wisdoms, from the below quotes 🙂

“If you stand in the middle of the road for too long, you may get hit from both sides.” 

Inaction has a cost. Be Decisive. It isn’t about being reckless. It’s about moving forward, learning quickly, and adjusting as you go. Stop Overthinking, Start Doing.

“Perfectionism is the enemy of progress” – Winston Churchill

The biggest roadblock to a decision isn’t a lack of information; it’s the belief that you must have a flawless plan before you start. Polishing endlessly and aiming for perfection hinders progress and keeps great ideas and tasks trapped in your head. Aim for “good enough to test,” then improve. Think in versions: v1 gets you moving, v2 makes it better, v3 refines based on feedback. Be consistent. Make a little progress everyday. Done Is Better Than Perfect.

“Schedule the Big Rocks, Don’t Sort Gravel” – Franklin Covey

Image source: nscblog.com

Teaches how to decide or prioritize, with a simple & clear analogy i.e. if you put the gravel (small tasks) into jar/day first, you will quickly fill it up, and you won’t have space for the big rocks (high-impact tasks or work that truly matters). Focus your limited time and energy on the truly important decisions and tasks like putting the big rocks in the jar first, and the little tasks or the gravel will fit around them.

“If you get on the wrong train, get off at the next station – the longer you stay, the more expensive the return trip will be.” – Japanese proverb

What if you make the “wrong” choice? A bad decision is only a failure if you refuse to change course. A quick Course Correction is cheaper than stubborn commitment to a mistake.

“Hamlet was wrong!” – Blink – Just do it!

Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Blink, suggests that, for many choices without catastrophic consequences, spontaneous decisions or gut judgments, backed by basic facts, are often as good as carefully planned ones. Are you stuck on analysis paralysis? Give a quick deadline, trust your instinct and ask yourself: What’s the smallest step I can take today to make some progress? Action creates clarity. Action creates momentum. Overthinking kills it. Stop Ruminating. Just Do It!

Thinking of complex frameworks? Simple tools can help you decide faster!

  • Mindfulness/Meditation: Clears mental clutter and improves focus, which is the foundation of deep thought.
  • Weighted pros/cons: List outcomes and tag impact as high/medium/low. Pick the highest‑impact option, not the longest list.
  • 80/20 Analysis: Identify the vital few drivers that produce most outcomes. Focus effort there.
  • Use data when the game is stable; use structured judgment when the game is changing. Choose, act, and adjust.
  • Reversible vs. irreversible: If a decision is reversible, decide fast. If it’s hard to undo, slow down and gather one more piece of key information, then commit.
  • Regret test: Ask, “Which choice will I regret not trying when I look back in a year?”
  • 70% rule: If you have roughly 70% of the information and waiting won’t change much, decide now and learn the rest by doing.
  • After‑action reviews: Post‑decision, ask: What did I expect? What happened? What will I do differently next time? Small reflections compound.
  • The Two Perspectives Rule: For any proposal, write both the strongest case for and against it before deciding.
  • Decision Trees: Map choices, probabilities, and payoffs. Useful for uncertainty and sequential decisions.
  • The Decision Log: In a journal, record key decisions with context, options considered, rationale, risks, and outcomes. Review monthly to spot patterns in your misjudgments.

We saw that decision-making is a combination of experience, intuition, data & structure. Simple frameworks can help us with everyday and tactical decisions. Corporates & expert strategists rely on advanced frameworks like Game Theory. But what about the Big Life Decisions—the ones that changes your identity and are irreversible, where you can’t truly know how it will feel until after you’ve become that person. Somethings like, should you have a child or stay child-free? Should you relinquish your country’s citizenship for a new one? Should you sacrifice a decade to become a brain surgeon? These are what philosophers call “transformative experiences” — a concept explored in the thought experiment known as “The Vampire Problem.”

The problem states that for choices that fundamentally change who you are (your identity and values), you cannot rationally predict the outcome, because the person who experiences the outcome doesn’t exist yet! How can you know if your future “vampire self” will be happy? Explained with two helpful lenses: Gilbert vs. Paul

  • Daniel Gilbert’s lens: When facing a big decision, like sacrificing the next 10 years of your life to become a brain surgeon, talk to people who have already done it. It makes a lot more sense for us to rely on other people’s lived experiences than to try to predict for ourselves.
  • L.A. Paul’s lens: Some decisions are identity-changing and irreversible. No amount of shadowing, babysitting, or role-playing truly tells you what life will feel like on the other side. We must look beyond logic. The decision is not about rationally proving you’ll be happy; it’s about asking: Who do you want to become? Do I have the courage to choose the self I want to discover?
  • Make the vampire problem practical: classify your decision
    • Reversible decisions (you can undo): Decide fast, test small, adjust. Use “done over perfect.” Your future self can course-correct at the next station.
    • Irreversible decisions (hard or impossible to undo): Slow down slightly, widen options, reality-test assumptions, and talk to many people. Then decide based on values, identity, and the person you hope to become.

Traps

  • Confirmation bias: Only seeing evidence that supports your current belief.
    • Counter with “disconfirming evidence” or run a Red Team Review.
  • Availability bias: Overweighting recent, vivid, or easily recalled examples..
    • Counter with historical base rates and broader statistical data.
  • Anchoring: Over-relying on the first number or piece of information presented.
    • Counter by generating multiple independent estimates.
  • Overfitting: Overcomplicating analysis.
    • Counter with simpler models and out-of-sample tests.
  • Action bias: Doing something fast vs. the right thing.
    • Counter with a short pause and a minimum viable analysis.

If you want to move from being an indecisive overthinker to a confident actor, start with the smallest decision today and commit to it.

Please click & expand to glance the books relevant to decision science:

Decisive: How to make better choices in life & work – Chip & Dan Health
  • Provides a four-step process – W.R.A.P.
  • Widen Your Options. Talk to people outside your circle who have solved a similar problem.
  • Reality-Test Assumptions. Run small experiments, prototype, seek out and listen to critics and watch for early signs of failure.
  • Attain Emotional Distance. Ask the “10/10/10” question: How will you feel about this decision 10 minutes from now? 10 months from now? 10 years from now? or “If a friend I respect faced this, what would I advise?” Zooming out reduces short-term emotional bias.
  • Prepare to Be Wrong. Accept that you may fail. Figure out many “if-then” situations.  Then make back-up plans for them. Once you’ve made your decision, keep a time when you can turn back and start again if you see early signs of failure.

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game – Michael Lewis
  • Do we make better decisions based on data or is it ok to trust our hunch / gut feel.
  • Data wins when the rules are stable. Moneyball showed how statistical evidence beat gut feel in baseball scouting. Baseball manager Billy Beane used the power of statistics to acquire young talent who were overlooked by the big clubs. The result? A winning team built on a fraction of the budget. In stable domains with lots of data—sports stats, marketing funnels, credit risk—data consistently outperforms hunches because the past is a strong guide to the future.
  • Gut matters more when the environment is volatile. In fast-changing contexts, past performance is a weaker map. Hiring is a prime example: short interviews often foster overconfidence, and we mistake confidence for competence. Unstructured interviews let bias creep in. Here, intuition should not be the main filter—but it can help assess adaptability, values, and learning mindset, which are harder to quantify yet vital in uncertainty.

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking – Malcolm Gladwell
  • Makes the case for speed and accuracy of rapid cognition and intuitive decision-making.
  • Explores the idea of thin-slicing: the ability of our unconscious mind to find patterns in situations and make surprisingly accurate judgements with very little information.
  • Spontaneous decisions are often as good as carefully planned ones.
  • Best suited for those who tend towards analysis paralysis.

Thinking Fast & Slow – Daniel Kahneman
  • Explores the two systems that drive how we think and make choices. System 1 (fast, intuitive & emotional) and System 2 (slow, deliberate & logical). Explains cognitive biases like confirmation bias and anchoring, that skew our judgement.

Mastering Game Theory: A Comprehensive Introduction to Strategic Decision Making – Ismail Saglam
  • Offers a comprehensive exploration of both noncooperative (individual decision making, Nash equilibrium) and cooperative (coalition formation, payoff division) game theory.
  • Equips with the tools to analyze strategic interactions, from sequential decision-making to the design of optimal economic mechanisms.

Please click & expand for a wealth of resources, tools & the references

*This blog post was refined using Gemini & ChatGPT

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