Malcolm gladwell hard decisions how to#
Malcolm gladwell hard decisions trial#
Malcolm gladwell hard decisions plus#

Within the binary of “quit or not,” the optimistic option is to quit and hope he can earn a living making art. It serves as a middle ground between a high-risk option and one that’s too prudent.įor example, imagine a postal worker who’s considering quitting his job to become an artist. A cautiously optimistic option prepares you for a range of outcomes- both positive and negative.

One technique for creating a both/and option is to combine an optimistic choice with a cautious one. In their book Decisive, authors Dan and Chip Heath recommend pursuing a both/and option: one that combines the best parts of both options. Thinking in binary terms may be less cognitively taxing, but it limits your options and clouds your judgment. When it comes to decision-making, we tend to come up with only two options. So, next time you’re faced with a difficult decision, try to limit the information that goes into your decision-making.īOOK_SUMMARYURL: blink-summary-malcolm-gladwell

They also avoid being overconfident in their predictions and pay extreme attention to detail. As Nate Silver argues in The Signal and the Noise, people who are highly accurate forecasters tend to use statistical analyses to separate signal from noise. If we listen carefully for the signal, we’re more likely to be feeding meaningful information into our unconscious decision-making apparatus.

Malcolm gladwell hard decisions plus#

Gladwell doesn’t provide this, but a good way of doing this is interpreting the information we receive as “signal,” or information that reveals key patterns, plus “noise,” or information that distracts us from the signal. The algorithm increased the accuracy of negative diagnoses by 70% (reducing the costs to the hospital of admitting patients who weren’t in danger of having a heart attack) and increased the accuracy of positive diagnoses to 95% (saving the lives of people who did go on to have major complications).įor this advice to be genuinely useful, we need to have some way of distinguishing crucial from superfluous information. Previously, doctors had taken a multitude of complex factors into account when diagnosing heart problems, leading to many inconsistent and potentially incorrect decisions.Ī new computer algorithm reduced that large number of factors to four. Too much information can overwhelm you with details and obscure the bigger picture.Īs an example of the pitfalls of overloading yourself with information before a decision, Gladwell discusses a shift that occurred at Cook County Hospital in Chicago in the late 1990s, when it changed the way it assessed ER patients with chest pain. However, according to Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink, sometimes the best decision is a less-informed decision. Most of us have been taught that to make good decisions, we need to consider as much information as possible.

Malcolm gladwell hard decisions how to#

Here are some tips on how to make a difficult decision. That said, there are strategies and tips that can help you arrive at the most optimal decision given the information you do have. Rather, our information is often messy and flawed, so we can’t always predict how our decisions will pan out. Why is it so hard to make decisions? What are some ways you can narrow down your options to make it easier to arrive at an optimal choice?ĭecision-making is difficult because nobody has access to perfectly accurate, comprehensive sources of information.

Malcolm gladwell hard decisions trial#

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