Quotes About Decision-making

Steve Jobs: "People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.

Since procrastination is a message from our natural willpower via low motivation, the cure is changing the environment, or one's profession, by selecting one in which one does not have to fight one's impulses. Few can grasp the logical consequence that, instead, one should lead a life in which procrastination is good, as a naturalistic-risk-based form of decision making.

Please, don't drive a school bus blindfolded.

The psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has a simple heuristic. Never ask the doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your place. You would be surprised at the difference.

Because what matters in life isn't how frequently one is "right" about outcomes, but how much one makes when one is right. Being wrong, when it is not costly, doesn't count—in a way that's similar to trial-and-error mechanisms of research.

No, businessmen as risk takers are not subjected to the judgment of other businessmen, only to that of their personal accountant.

Corporations are in love with the idea of the strategic plan. They need to pay to figure out where they are going. Yet there is no evidence that strategic planning works—we even seem to have evidence against it. A management scholar, William Starbuck, has published a few papers debunking the effectiveness of planning—it makes the corporation option-blind, as it gets locked into a non-opportunistic course of action.

avoidance of small mistakes makes the large ones more severe.

It is also related to a problem called denigration of history, as gamblers, investors, and decision-makers feel that the sorts of things that happen to others would not necessarily happen to them.

Never ask the doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your place. You would be surprised at the difference.

understanding how to act under conditions of incomplete information is the highest and most urgent human pursuit.

A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in the light of the information until that point.

Heuristics are simplified rules of thumb that make things simple and easy to implement. But their main advantage is that the user knows that they are not perfect, just expedient, and is therefore less fooled by their powers. They become dangerous when we forget that.

The problem is that we humans are prone to the availability heuristic, by which the salient is mistaken for the statistical, and the conspicuous and emotional effect of an event makes us think it is occurring more regularly than in reality. This helps us to be prudent and careful in daily life, forcing us to add an extra layer of protection, but

His idea is that if we were to optimize at every step in life, then it would cost us an infinite amount of time and energy. Accordingly

The policies we need to make decisions on should depend far more on the range of possible outcomes than on the expected final number. I

Hire the successful trader, conditional on a solid track record, whose details you can understand the least.

You may prefer apples to oranges, oranges to pears, but pears to apples—it depends on how the choices are presented to you. The

This anchoring to a number is the reason people do not react to their total accumulated wealth, but to differences of wealth from whatever number they are currently anchored to. This is the major conflict with economic theory, as according to economists, someone with $1 million in the bank would be more satisfied than if he had half a million. But

The consequences are not trivial: It means that rational thinking has little, very little, to do with risk avoidance. Much of what rational thinking seems to do is rationalize one's actions by fitting some logic to them.

by creating bureaucracies, we put civil servants in a position to make decisions based on abstract and theoretical matters, with the illusion that they will be making them in a rational, accountable way.

I've looked in history for heroes who became heroes for what they did not do, but it is hard to observe nonaction; I could not easily find any.

The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything," he said.

el mayor y más acuciante objetivo humano es comprender cómo actuar en condiciones de información incompleta.