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There is one final question the effective decision-maker asks: 'Is a decision really necessary?' One alternative is always the alternative of doing nothing. Every decision is like surgery. It is an intervention into a system and therefore carries with it the risk of shock. One does not make unnecessary decisions any more than a good surgeon does unnecessary surgery. Individual decision-makers, like individual surgeons, differ in their styles. Some are more radical or more conservative than others. But by and large, they agree on the rules.

Now the civil servant called the trades that ended up as losers "gross mistakes," just like journalists call decisions that end up costing a candidate his election a "mistake." I will repeat this point until I get hoarse: A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in the light of the information until that point.

In your own life, you can use Hick's law to remember that decision time is going to increase with the number of choices, and so if you want people to make quick decisions, reduce the number of choices. One way to do this is to give yourself or others a multi-step decision with fewer choices at each step, such as asking what type of restaurant to go to (Italian, Mexican, etc.), and then offering another set of choices within the chosen category.

"Our brains crave reducing things to two or three options," said Eric Johnson, a cognitive psychologist at Columbia University who studies decision making. "So when we're faced with a lot of information, we start automatically arranging it into mental folders and subfolders and sub-subfolders."

'Defensive Decision-Making' - making a decision which is unconsciously designed not to maximise welfare overall but to minimise the damage to the decision maker in the event of a negative outcome.

It's as though our brains are configured to make a certain number of decisions per day and once we reach that limit, we can't make any more, regardless of how important they are. One of the most useful findings in recent neuroscience could be summed up as: The decision-making network in our brain doesn't prioritize.

Remember, making decisions under uncertainty is like travelling to Gatwick Airport: you have to consider two things - not only the expected average outcome, but also the worst-case scenario. It is no good judging things on their average expectation without considering the possible level of variance.

Poker has taught me to disconnect failure from outcomes. Just because I lose doesn't mean I failed, and just because I won doesn't mean I succeeded--not when you define success and failure around making good decisions that will win in the long run. What matters is the decisions I made along the way, and every decision failure is an opportunity to learn and adjust my strategy going forward. By doing this, losing becomes a less emotional experience and more an opportunity to explore and learn.

ego. It is well known that decision-making is one of the most tiring and wearying tasks, which is why people like Barack Obama or Bill Gates only wear two suit colours: dark blue or dark grey. This means they have one less decision to make in the morning, leaving more resources for the decisions that really matter.

Blame, unlike credit, always finds a home, and no one ever got fired for booking JFK.

I know of executives and investors who keep a "decision journal" in which they record the major decisions they make each week, why they made them, and what they expect the outcome to be. They review their choices at the end of each month or year to see where they were correct and where they went wrong.

Some decisions are best made after acquiring more information; some are best made immediately. Just as you need to constantly sort the big from the small when you are synthesizing what's going on, you need to constantly evaluate the marginal benefit of gathering more information against the marginal cost of waiting to decide.

There is a natural conflict between the desire to make decisions quickly and the feeling that you need to accumulate more information to be sure you are making the right choice. You can deal with this conflict by categorizing decisions as either reversible decisions or irreversible decisions. Irreversible decisions are hard if not impossible to unwind. And they tend to be really important. Think of selling your business or having a kid. This model holds that these decisions require a different decision-making process than their reversible counterparts, which should be treated much more fluidly.

Recognize that decision making is a two-step process: First take in all the relevant information, then decide. Most people are reluctant to take in information that is inconsistent with what they have already concluded.

The effective executive, therefore, always asks: 'What does this fellow have to see if his position were, after all, tenable, rational, intelligent?' The effective executive is concerned first with understanding. Only then does he even think about who is right and who is wrong.

almost all "cases at hand" are just "another one of those," identifying which "one of those" it is, and then applying well-thought-out principles for dealing with it.

preserving optionality. The idea is to make choices that preserve future options. Maybe as a business you put some excess profits into a rainy-day fund, or as an employee you dedicate some time to learning new skills that might give you options for future employment. Or, when faced with a decision, maybe you can delay deciding at all (see thinking gray in Chapter 1) and, instead, continue to wait for more information, keeping your options open until you are more certain of a better path to embark upon.

The effective decision-maker does not start out with the assumption that one proposed course of action is right and that all others must be wrong. Nor does he start out with the assumption, 'I am right and he is wrong.' He starts out with the commitment to find out why people disagree.

act if on balance the benefits greatly outweigh cost and risk; and - act or do not act; but do not 'hedge' or compromise. The surgeon who only takes out half the tonsils or half the appendix risks as much infection or shock as if he did the whole job.

2: Find your unique uniform. Steve Jobs always wore the same clothes: a black turtleneck by Issey Miyake, Levi's 501s, and a pair of New Balance sneakers, which even served as his attire for public presentations. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg seems to be fond of a gray T-shirt. Einstein is said to have always worn the same type of jacket. These people took the time that others spend on choosing clothes and chasing trends and turned their attention instead to the things that mattered most to them.

Jeff Bezos stressed the importance of this model: Some decisions are consequential and irreversible or nearly irreversible--one-way doors--and these decisions must be made methodically, carefully, slowly, with great deliberation and consultation. If you walk through and don't like what you see on the other side, you can't get back to where you were before .... But most decisions aren't like that--they are changeable, reversible--they're two-way doors. If you've made a suboptimal [reversible] decision, you don't have to live with the consequences for that long. You can reopen the door and go back through .... As organizations get larger, there seems to be a tendency to use the heavy-weight [irreversible] decision-making process on most decisions, including many [reversible] decisions. The end result of this is slowness, unthoughtful risk aversion, failure to experiment sufficiently, and consequently diminished invention.

A believability-weighted idea meritocracy is the best system for making effective decisions.

learning how to make decisions in the best possible way and learning to have the courage to make them comes from a) going after what you want, b) failing and reflecting well through radical open-mindedness, and c) changing/evolving to become ever more capable and less fearful.