Quotes About Decision

In times of change, you may not know what options are available. And this uncertainty leads to decision paralysis as surely as a table with 24 jams.

You can't script every move—that would be like trying to foresee the seventeenth move in a chess game. It's the critical moves that count.

This doesn't make sense. The doctors were acting as though having more medication options somehow made medication a worse bet than surgery. But if 47 percent of doctors thought medication A was preferable to surgery, the mere existence of a second medication shouldn't have tipped them toward surgery.

WHEN LIFE OFFERS US a "this or that" choice, we should have the gall to ask whether the right answer might be "both.

You cannot choose any of the current options you're considering. What else could you

What happened here is decision paralysis. More options, even good ones, can freeze us and make us retreat to the default plan, which in this case was a painful and invasive hip-replacement surgery. This behavior clearly is not rational, but it is human.

Not cocky overconfidence that comes from collecting biased information and ignoring uncertainties, but the real confidence that comes from knowing you've made the best decision that you could.

What if we started every decision by asking some simple questions: What are we giving up by making this choice? What else could we do with the same time and money?

By preloading a decision, they created an instant habit.

If you've finished Switch and are hungry for more, visit the book's website: heathbrothers.com

Switch podcast series.

Prioritization rescues people from the quicksand of decision angst, and that's why finding the core is so valuable.

That's why the initial slowness of bargaining may be offset by a critical advantage: It speeds up implementation. The superintendent can make a lightning-fast decision if she makes it autocratically, but if her administrators and teachers hate it, then adoption will come to a standstill.

Ambiguity does, too. In times of change, you may not know what options are available. And this uncertainty leads to decision paralysis

One rule of thumb is to keep searching for options until you fall in love at least twice. If you've only identified one good candidate for a job, for instance, you'll have the strong urge to talk yourself into hiring her, which is a recipe for the confirmation bias.

Deadlines focus our mental spotlight on a choice. They grab us by the collar and say, If you're gonna do this, you have to do it now.

tripwires allow us the certainty of committing to a course of action, even a risky one, while minimizing the costs of overconfidence.

You can't script every move—that would be like trying to foresee the seventeenth move in a chess game. It's the critical moves that count. Recall

researchers have found again and again that people act as though losses are from two to four times more painful than gains are pleasurable.

You'll direct the Rider, motivate the Elephant, and shape the Path.

these were not stories about sudden realizations. These were stories about action.

The Paradox of Choice

Without clear priorities to draw on, the decision will be made idiosyncratically, depending on the employee's mood at the moment.

the fourth villain of decision making is overconfidence. People think they know more than they do about how the future will unfold.