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daroos replied to your post:skipthedemon replied to your post:Sleepy…

Is Decisive a book? Is it a book I need? It sounds like a book I need.

Decisive is a book, and I firmly believe that everyone of our generation should at least try reading it. 

Chip and Dan Heath are two terrifyingly intelligent brothers who have written a series of books that are, really, at base, how to hack the brain of yourself and everyone else around you in healthy, positive ways – they’re not quite self-help books, more like…guidebooks to adulting. Two of their books, Made to Stick and Switch, are primarily about business, but have personal applications also – they’re both about effecting permanent change, or knowing when to make a change. 

Decisive is about techniques for making better decisions and how to give yourself more options when faced with a choice. For example, they briefly talk about making a pro/con list (and the history of it – apparently Ben Franklin really loved them) but then they talk about moving beyond the pro/con list to more sophisticated techniques that help to exclude emotional bias. 

Like, they talk about “hedging”, where you give yourself a taste of each option or you hedge your investment in a choice. If my main concern was whether I’d be happy in Boston or whether I’d want to move back to Chicago, I might “hedge” by putting most of my stuff in cheap pod storage, going to Boston with just the basics, and sending for my stuff in six months if I was still happy there, or moving back if I found I wasn’t. If I wanted to make the move permanent, I wouldn’t pay significantly more than if I’d moved six months earlier, and if I didn’t, I wouldn’t pay to move at all, just a sort of convenience fee for storage. 

And just thinking about hedging helped me say “No, I don’t need to do that. I know I’ll like the city, I just don’t know about the job” which helped me focus on the real concerns I have as opposed to the extraneous stuff. 

Last time I used the book’s techniques, I was trying to decide whether to leave my job (because it was moving south and would make my commute hard) or move south to be closer to it, and I used their “set a deadline” advice. Rather than immediately choosing one or the other, I decided to jobsearch for six months, and if I hadn’t found anything, I’d stop jobsearching and start looking for apartments. It worked really well, and that’s how I ended up in this sweet condo I’ve got now. 😀

Anyway, I strongly recommend all three books; I think they are exceptional for helping people cope with a very uncertain world. But Decisive has been the most directly useful to me in my personal life. Every time I’m faced with a decision of this agonizing, terrifying size, I re-read the book to try and find the best way to move forward. It always has something to offer that I’d forgotten about. 🙂