How To Be Decisive: A Simple Guide For Smart People Most Intelligent People...

HOW TO BE DECISIVE: A SIMPLE GUIDE FOR SMART PEOPLE

Most intelligent people need to think less theoretically and act more in the moment. Be more decisive.

As a small child, I used to overanalyse decisions, taking a long time to come to conclusions about what to do. It overly inhibited my OODA loop (action was delayed too long; opportunities passed) and made learning slower than it should have been.

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Later, I would over plan business decisions and produce extremely complicated, detailed business proposals that, by their complexity, reduced my ability to sell my ideas. My clients wanted simple, fast, and good enough, and I was offering perfection at great cost.

Generally, in life, whoever acts first wins the day, at least in the short term. While you are contemplating your next move, the midwits and low-IQ normies are pounding your face in, flirting with the girl you’ve been eyeing, or launching the business you’ve been considering for the last two years. Unless you want that to be your life forever, follow my advice.

You can’t get ahead in life by being the slowest to act.

Growing up in a high-crime area, I experienced near-daily, unavoidable fighting. Several severe beatings taught me to act first, win the fight, and then analyze from a position of strength. Thus, I developed my current process for rapid decision-making.

The Winning Process

0. Before the test, mentally prepare yourself by gathering accurate information and practicing your mental and physical responses to stimuli (training). Know what you are likely to encounter and make a plan. Stop thinking about what might happen to you and focus on what you need to do to win.

1. Trust your gut response and your training to act immediately on a pressing issue with full confidence that you are right (while knowing that you might be wrong). Leave the doubts for later.

2. At the end of the day or week, look back and analyze the situations you faced in more depth. If your response was wrong, or even less than ideal, correct the mistake and make things right. Update your plans. You are looking for the root cause, not just the last decision.

More than 90% of the time, our gut response is right or good enough. The last 10% to achieve perfection requires tremendous investment, more than equal to the first 90%. Therefore, the cost to achieve 100% is not worth the time and lost opportunities; it is better to act, make a mistake, and ask forgiveness than to forgo rapid action.

Being theoretically 100% right and practically inactive is the death of many smart people. Literally and figuratively. That is why I am no longer interested in being 100% right, only in being right enough to act in a way that “wins” most of the time.

Anyone who acts will fail. Occasional failure is part of life; embrace it when it comes. It is a sign that you are doing something difficult and pushing your limits. As long as it does not kill you, all is well.

“It is not the critic who counts; it is not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” Theodore Roosevelt