Quotes About Decision-making

If you haven't already accomplished at least one important task in the day, don't spend the last business hour returning a DVD to avoid a $5 late charge. Get the important task done and pay the $5 fine.

What you choose to work on, and who you choose to work with, are far more important than how hard you work.

TF: Decide beforehand—and not reactively when emotions run high—what types of findings are worth acting upon or ignoring, and what your "if/then" actions will be

We waste our time with short-term thinking and busywork. Warren Buffett spends a year deciding and a day acting. That act lasts decades.

Never automate something that can be eliminated, and never delegate something that can be automated or streamlined. Otherwise, you waste someone else's time instead of your own, which now wastes your hard-earned cash.

If you are reading an article that sucks, put it down and don't pick it back up. If you go to a movie and it's worse than Matrix III, get the hell out of there before more neurons die. If you're full after half a plate of ribs, put the damn fork down and don't order dessert.

The books Superforecasting (by Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner) and How to Measure Anything (by Douglas W. Hubbard) have some good advice on how to improve your ability to make accurate predictions. And Decisive (by Chip Heath and Dan Heath) explains four of the biggest judgment errors (like framing your decision too narrowly, or letting temporary emotions cloud your judgment) and gives tips for combating them.

Julia is the co-founder of the Center for Applied Rationality, a nonprofit that runs workshops on improving reasoning and decision-making.

Because most of us say yes to too much stuff, and then, we let these little, mediocre things fill our lives…. The problem is, when that occasional, 'Oh my God, hell yeah!' thing comes along, you don't have enough time to give it the attention that you should, because you've said yes to too much other little, half-ass stuff, right?

Do your own thinking independently. Be the chess player, not the chess piece. —RALPH CHARELL

Interrogate the information shared with you by others, and use it as a way to make up your own mind, not a path to follow.

Marie Kondo method: "Discard [say no to] everything that does not spark joy." This includes personal obligations. I'm working

Everything in discernment of spirits is directed toward action: toward firmly accepting what is of God and equally firmly rejecting what is not.

Professional ethics must guide us precisely when we are told that the situation is exceptional.

And obviously, with hindsight now, now knowing what went on in the company, it would have been absolutely appropriate back then for us to have the chief executive of the company, most senior person in the United Kingdom, come and answer for the policy they were pursuing. And we ducked that, and frankly that's a failure of Parliament.

These are the dilemmas for cancer patients. Who and what to believe? A particular treatment is not foolproof, or as many medical experts remind us, is not math, with a fixed and certain outcome.

Barry Schwartz's distinction between maximizers and satisficers has given us the counterintuitive insight that restricting our choices in life can actually lead to greater happiness and satisfaction, and

Risk management is not the same as worrying about your project.

In politics, you must learn to say 'no' without offending people. That is an art that one must master: to satisfy a person even when you have to say 'no' to him.

When you have an open shot, it's an open shot and it's not about your role or the offense.

If I'm on the board of any company where there's an offer that comes in, I want to negotiate.

When you first start working, you take whatever job is offered, because you have to build your resume. But you don't think about what you're building.

With 'Lady Macbeth,' I had two other things offered to me, and they would have also been very fun, but you just have to figure that out. And then you do it.

I don't want to do every independent film offered to me.