Knowing when not to bet is as important as knowing what bets are probably worth making. You can significantly improve your track record if you only make the bets that you are most confident will pay off.

The best choices are the ones that have more pros than cons, not those that don’t have any cons at all. Watch out for people who argue against something whenever they can find something—anything—wrong with it, without properly weighing all the pluses and minuses. Such people tend to be poor decision makers.
Prioritize by weighing the value of additional information against the cost of not deciding.

Some decisions are best made after acquiring more information; some are best made immediately. Just as you need to constantly sort the big from the small when you are synthesizing what’s going on, you need to constantly evaluate the marginal benefit of gathering more information against the marginal cost of waiting to decide. People who prioritize well understand the following:

All of your “must-dos” must be above the bar before you do your “like-to-dos.” Separate your “must-dos” from your “like-to-dos” and don’t mistakenly slip any “like-to-dos” onto the first list.

Chances are you won’t have time to deal with the unimportant things, which is better than not having time to deal with the impor-tant things. I often hear people say, “Wouldn’t it be good to do this or that?” It’s likely they are being distracted from far more important things that need to be done well.

Don’t mistake possibilities for probabilities. Anything is possible. It’s the probabilities that matter. Everything must be weighed in terms of its likelihood and prioritized. People who can accurately sort probabilities from possibilities are generally strong at “practical thinking”; they’re the opposite of the “philosopher” types who tend to get lost in clouds of possibilities.
SHORTCUTS FOR BECOMING A GREAT DECISION MAKER
