Great decision makers don’t remember all of these steps in a rote way and carry them out mechanically, yet they do follow them. That’s because through time and experience they’ve learned to do most of them reflexively, just as a baseball player catches a fly ball without thinking about how he’s going to do it. If they had to call each of the principles up from their memory and then run them through their slow conscious minds, they couldn’t possibly handle all the things that are coming at them well. But there are a couple of things that they do carry out consciously and you should do them too.
Simplify!

Get rid of irrelevant details so that the essential things and the relationships between them stand out. As the saying goes, “Any damn fool can make it complex. It takes a genius to make it simple.” Think of Picasso. He could paint beautiful representational paintings from an early age, but he continually pared down and simplified as his career progressed. Not everyone has a mind that works that way, but just because you can’t do something naturally doesn’t mean you can’t do it—you just have to have creativity and determination. If necessary, you can seek the help of others.
Use principles.

Using principles is a way of both simplifying and improving your decision making. While it might seem obvious to you by now, it’s worth repeating that realizing that almost all “cases at hand” are just “another one of those,” identifying which “one of those” it is, and then applying well-thought-out principles for dealing with it. This will allow you to massively reduce the number of decisions you have to make (I estimate by a factor of something like 100,000) and will lead you to make much better ones. The key to doing this well is to:

Slow down your thinking so you can note the criteria you are using to make your decision.

Write the criteria down as a principle.
