Introduction

How is there freedom to choose if one does not learn how to choose?

—David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

Every day, there is something you do again and again. Sometimes you do it consciously, agonizing over it for days, weeks, even months. Other times, you do it so fast you don’t even realize it’s happening. Sometimes it is completely inconsequential. Sometimes it entirely changes the course of your life. What is it?

Making decisions.

Throughout life, you are constantly making choices, large and small.

What shirt should I wear today?

What should I do this weekend?

Should I take the freelance gig where I can work remotely, or the office job with the retirement plan?

Should I change careers? Move cities? Start a family?

Of all the skills you have, decision-making is arguably the most important to your future happiness. Choices about your career, your relationships, and how you spend your time will shape your life. The results of small decisions add up to big impacts. A daily five-minute chat in the morning with your boss, a twenty-minute walk every day, a half hour to regularly practice a new skill… After a year, these relatively small decisions could translate to a promotion at work, improved health, and new abilities.

Decisions, big and small, are how you grow toward your desired future.

You may be intelligent, talented, and full of grit, but if you’re bad at making decisions (or following through on them), it’s going to be difficult to achieve your goals. This is bad news, because most of us aren’t nearly as good at decision-making as we think we are, and we’re not even close to as good as we could be.

You Probably Suck at Making Decisions…

You probably suck at making good decisions. It’s not personal. It’s not just you who struggles making decisions; it’s all of us.

As humans, we have many cognitive biases. These deeply ingrained, instinctual ways of thinking have served us well as a species, helping us to survive. But now that we’ve moved past mere survival, these biases often work against us, getting in the way of true happiness and fulfillment.

To further complicate matters, despite how important decision-making is, it hasn’t made it into many school curriculums. That means it is a skill that we’re not innately good at and that we’ve never been taught. Of course we struggle with it!

The whole situation can be incredibly frustrating and disheartening. You want to make good decisions, and you try to, but you don’t get the results you want. You might spend years headed down one path only to eventually realize that it’s not taking you where you want to go. Or you might flip-flop between options so much that you never make any forward progress. You take a few steps in one direction, feel like it’s not working, then pivot and take a couple of steps in another direction. You may constantly be in motion but never travel far from your starting point.

In either case, you end up burning a lot of time and energy without getting any closer to your goals—if you’re even clear on what your goals are. You know there must be a better way. You see other people who seem to have figured it out, so the information must be out there. But when you try to get this information for yourself, you’ll typically find two types of resources.

First, you’ll find a bunch of abstract, ineffectual self-help literature that sounds promising but doesn’t deliver. While these works may contain some good ideas—and are written with the best of intentions—they typically lack actionable advice. You’ll read all about the importance of finding your passion and purpose without ever learning how you’re supposed to do that.

Second, you’ll find dense scientific articles and studies. These contain nuggets of wisdom, but they’re buried under jargon and references to other studies you haven’t read yet. Reading through just one of these articles can take hours—and a dictionary—and at the end, you’re often left with the same problem as with the self-help literature. You have no idea how to apply what you’ve learned to get real results in your life.

It can feel like standing on one side of a deep chasm, able to see all that you want on the other side, but with no way to get there from where you are. Considering this, it’s no wonder that you may sometimes feel overwhelmed by decisions. Fear seeps in. What if I make the wrong choice? Paralyzed by the fear of getting it wrong, you don’t make any choice at all. Which, by the way, is still a decision—one that guarantees you’ll stay stuck exactly where you are.

If you’ve struggled making decisions, you’re not alone. You’re not crazy or broken. You’re human.

If you’ve felt any of this, don’t worry. I’ve been there before too—I think we all have. None of us is as good at decision-making as we could be, but we can each take responsibility for getting better. If you’re unhappy with where you are or where you seem to be headed, you can make choices to change those things. You can choose how your future goes. You just need some knowledge and a way to put it into use. That’s what this book is for.

…And You Can Definitely Get Better

Decision-making is a skill, and like any skill, you can get better at it with practice—with one big caveat: it has to be the right kind of practice. You could spend thousands of hours throwing a football, but if you spend all those hours using the wrong form, you’re never going to throw a perfect spiral. Similarly, if you want to become a better decision maker, you can’t just make a bunch of decisions. You’re already doing that. To improve, you need to practice making decisions using the right strategies.

To get better at decision-making, you need to rethink how you approach decisions and understand that making a decision is just one step in the middle of a larger process.

Before you can effectively make better decisions, you need the right mindset, and you need to understand your cognitive biases. You also need a clear vision for what you want. After all, if you don’t know where you’re going, how can you possibly expect to get there?

Then, when you make a deliberate decision, you need to follow through. If you’re human and old enough to be reading this, you’ve probably failed to follow through on at least one plan or commitment you’ve made in the past. We’ve all made choices that we didn’t stick with, even though we wanted to. So you also need strategies to turn your decisions into consistent action.

There’s a huge body of scientific research covering all these aspects of decision-making and follow-through. This book is a distillation of that research into a practical guide for day-to-day use. It’s a bridge across the metaphorical chasm.

In this book, you’ll learn science-backed strategies for creating the life you want. You’ll learn about:

• The importance of mindset and how to build one that sets you up for success
• Harmful cognitive biases and ways to counteract them
• Practical methods to clarify your long-term goals
• A clear process for choosing between options
• How to design an actionable plan and improve your follow-through
• How to create and use habits to reach your goals more easily and quickly
• How to stay committed to your goals even when the going gets tough
• Tips and strategies to supercharge your learning and progress

My own goal with this book is to make the information you need accessible so that you can feel empowered in your decision-making. This book is meant to be a guide you can refer back to again and again. I encourage you to read through the entire book at least once, as I’ve specifically organized things in such a way that understanding—and applying—the early sections will make implementing the later sections easier and more effective.

Once you have a handle on the big ideas, feel free to jump around. Need help sticking to your new workout routine? Flip to the chapter on building habits. Feeling discouraged, as if you have no control over your life and you’re never going to get better at any of this? Head back to the first chapter. Struggling to figure out what you want in life? Jump to the chapter on how to define your life and career goals.

More than anything, I want to help you create real, long-term improvement in your life. My hope is that, by the end of this book,...