You Can Train Yourself to Make Good Decisions
By: Paul Cipparone
Tags: Life, Lessons Learned, Life Lessons, Entrepreneurship, Training

Photo by Elena Mozhvilo on Unsplash

The ability to make good decisions is not something you’re born with. It’s a skill like any other. You can get better or worse at skills depending on the decisions you make every day.

I guess this skill is a little more meta because it’s the skill of making good decisions, and to build that skill you have to make good decisions. That’s kind of a catch-22, and it might be why people often don’t do it. At the beginning of this process, you have to just decide to bootstrap it, which is really hard because you’re not going to be very good at it. Despite that, it does eventually get easier and easier. This is kind of true by necessity due to the aforementioned meta aspect of this stuff.

If you’re not sure if it’ll be worth it to invest the time into this stuff, let me ease your worries. Making good decisions is a skill that you really want. It’s almost like the ur-skill that makes the entirety of life easier.

If you’re not sure where to get started with this process, here’s some stuff that I’ve found helpful. Everything here is pretty basic, and that’s intentional. There aren’t really any shortcuts- this is stuff that most people can do. I’ve found that in general the less-well known stuff is really helpful at the margin, but not necessarily very helpful to someone who’s just trying to get the basics right.

The main thing you want to do to make good decisions is to make sure that you’re in a good headspace when you have to make them. Because these things could happen at any time, this really just means maximizing the amount of time you’re in a good headspace. This has nice fringe benefits for your personal life, so it’s pretty much a no-lose scenario to do these.

The strategy here is first to remove barriers to good decision-making, and then be proactive and do things in support of it. We’ll go thru the specifics of both. First, removing barriers.

A big way you can do this is to keep your body healthy. This means eat healthy, exercise, and get enough sleep. I wrote an article that goes over the first two. Sleep is its own beast but this is a great overview about it. Making sure your body is on a good track is the first step to making good decisions- your body can easily stand in your way if you let it.

Another big piece is making sure your mental game is where you want it to be. There are a variety of ways to do this- in fact, if you take care of physical issues, a lot of mental issues often go with them. Next is to figure out how you can make time for mindfulness in your life. This could be through journaling, prayer, meditation, or something like that. I like journaling and meditation- in fact, I wrote another article all about how to get started meditating.

So now you’ve removed both physical and mental barriers. What is there left to do? The main thing is to learn. Specifically, you want to learn as much as you can about the things that you’re likely to make decisions on. The more knowledge you have about something going in, the better chance you’re going to make a good decision related to it. And it’s not always obvious what to study for each decision.

For example, if you want to be a CEO and make decisions about the future of a company, you may want to read a few books on business. But you also really want to learn about the product or service that your company does, and you also want to study the history of other people who have been in similar positions to you. It also doesn’t hurt to know the basics of mathematics, no matter what position you’re in.

There’s also nothing wrong with going deep on whatever really specific interests you might have too- that knowledge typically has a funny way of cropping up in ways that you don’t expect. The main thing here is to keep an open mind. Don’t be afraid to admit that you may not know anything about what you want to do.

Making good decisions is hard when you get started, but it is hugely beneficial regardless of your job or your position in life.