11 Mar How to make tough decisions … tips from Barack Obama!
It could easily be argued that happiness is largely about decision making.
What will I eat today? Will I exercise? With whom will I interact? and on what will I focus?
Friendships, healthy living, priorities … all contribute one way or other to happiness and wellbeing.
So if you’d like to enjoy more happiness by making better decisions, read on and see if you think this 3 step process might help…
via Inc.com by Jessica Stillman
You think you have to make stressful, high-stakes decisions for your work? Just imagine what it’s like to have to make the call to send young soldiers into harm’s way or weigh bailing out bankers who deserve a jail sentence more than a rescue boat against tanking the economy?
How on earth could any mere mortal make such impossibly tough decisions? There are only five Americans in the world who can speak to that, and one of them just opened up.
Speaking at a gathering of tech workers, former President Barack Obama spoke in detail about how he handled the crushing pressure of presidential decision-making. Every call was horrible — “If it was an easily solvable problem, or even a modestly difficult but solvable problem, it would not reach me, because, by definition, somebody else would have solved it,” he recalled — but he figured out a constructive approach to thinking through some of the world’s most intractable problems.
1. Swap certainty for probabilities.
Psychologist David Dunning, of Dunning-Kruger effect fame, is known for studying stupidity, but through the power of contrast his work also illuminates how smart people think. Dumb people, he recently opined, see the world in black-and-white. Smart people think in probabilities.
“Not, ‘Will X or Y occur?’ but, ‘What is the chance of X or Y occurring — 10, 50, 80 percent?'” he said. Obama agrees with him.
The first step to making a truly tough decision, he told the gathering is “being comfortable with the fact that you’re not going to get [a] 100 percent solution, and understanding that you’re dealing with probabilities, so that you don’t get paralyzed trying to think that you’re going to actually solve this perfectly,” Quartz reports…
…keep reading the full & original article HERE