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How to Take Good Decisions?

9 points rookie123 | 1 comments | 20 Nov 24 17:17 UTC | HN request time: 0.199s | source

Hey everyone! I'm trying to get better at decision-making, both at work and in everyday life. Do you have any favorite books, articles, or courses that really helped you make better choices? I'd love any recommendations—whether it's practical tips, interesting frameworks, or just great reads. Thanks in advance!
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aristofun ◴[21 Nov 24 01:00 UTC] No.42199940[source]▶
There isn’t such a generic skill as “decision making”.

Sorry to disappoint but quality of your decisions grow only proportional to your expertise in some area.

There are adjacent and similar areas, so by getting better at one you improve your decision making in others as well.

But any book that tries to sell you generic “decision making” skill is a piece of garbage.

This is how skills work fundamentally.

Meta-skills cannot be learned, can’t be trained. This is why they are meta

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muzani ◴[21 Nov 24 09:55 UTC] No.42202662[source]▶
You can train chess moves and design patterns. There's definitely best practice books like The 33 Strategies of War, Greene. The startup world has lots of these as well - how to discover product market fit, how to run teams, when to hire COOs. Not all advice fits all situations, but having various palettes is handy.
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rookie123 ◴[21 Nov 24 09:57 UTC] No.42202679[source]▶
do you have any resources in that direction? Like we have around what atleast 5000 years of human history and history for larger part repeats itself.. there has to be some way to tap into this to optimize decision making.
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1. aristofun ◴[21 Nov 24 14:27 UTC] No.42204606[source]▶
The answer is - be specific.

Focus on exact narrow areas (even “startups” is way to generic, “startups fundraising” or “hiring in startups” are better examples) you want to improve.

And slowly (with life experience) you’ll build up a good intuition in those areas. But don’t expect it will help you be great in other distant fields. Though it may happen by accident or because you’re generally smart enough to avoid mistakes.