Bytes and Bikes

Make Better Decisions

Make Better Decisions

I have given significant thought to how to make good decisions lately. The most recent trigger of these thoughts was a My First Million podcast episode. In this episode, one of the hosts - Shaan Puri - shared his “decision survey,” which is a list of questions he answers for himself when making a decision. The list of questions itself was interesting and useful (I’ve created a Google Forms template for them here). Even more thought-provoking to me was the ensuing discussion between Puri and his cohost about how important making good decisions is. I agree that decision-making is one of the most important and most neglected skills that someone could train. Following are some of the biggest influences on my decision-making lately. Some are from the podcast episode while others are from other sources, including one I bet most of you haven’t considered.

From the My First Million episode, I learned that blended reason - multiple weak reasons - don’t measure up to a single strong reason. In other words, if you can’t find one strong reason for a particular decision, then you likely should not make that decision. For example, when we were deciding what observability tool to adopt at work, choosing Honeycomb for a blended reason would have meant choosing it because it was cheaper, supported most of our use cases, and showed some promise for future capabilities. There isn’t a single strong reason there, instead it’s a list of relatively weak reasons. On the other hand, one strong reason to pick Honeycomb would have been that they support tracing extremely well. Instead, we picked Grafana Cloud for the one strong reason that Grafana supports how we currently query and analyze our logs, and Honeycomb’s lack of support, by contrast, was ultimately deemed a deal breaker.

When searching for that single strong reason, an important place to look is what network effects the decision will precipitate. I was influenced by the work of James Currier in this area, especially his article “Your Life & Network Effects.” Network effects are the effects that those around us have on our lives. If we surround ourselves with people that like to watch lots of TV and are mostly sedentary, that laziness will likely negatively influence us. Similarly, if we surround ourselves with people who like to work on challenging projects, we’ll be inspired to do the same.

Currier’s thesis is that there are several crossroads in life which involve significant decisions, and the network effects - the people we’ll be surrounded with - due to the decision should have more influence on these decisions than they typically do. He identifies five main crossroads - decisions - where you should seriously consider network effects: high school, college, first job, spouse, and where you live. All of these have profound effects on your life simply because they influence whom you will come in regular contact with.

Unfortunately, many of you reading this may have already passed many of these crossroads. In fact, where you live is the only one I would generally recommend considering a change once you’ve passed that crossroad. Fortunately, there are many other smaller decisions that can have positive network effects. Joining a community like a gym or a church could have a profound impact on your network. My family has experienced many positive network effects from attending our church. In fact, my wife and I moved - one of the crossroads that Currier mentions - to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho in 2019, but if we had chosen to attend a different church or no church when we arrived I don’t think the move would have had nearly the impact on our lives that it did. Through our church, we have made many new friends who are at a similar life stage, have similar ambitions, and whom we can rely on in a tough spot.

I have become convinced that it’s important to evaluate your past decisions and, consequently, have a system for making decisions. I am going to start writing down how I came to my decisions, and I will review them periodically to evaluate how my decisions turn out and see if I can learn from my successes and failures. A few things that I will make sure to record in my decision records are any alternatives that I considered, any subsequent actions required to make the decision successful, and the criteria which must be met for the decision to be considered a success. I think each of these points are especially important for both a higher decision success rate and retrospective evaluation.

Finally, I’m willing to bet you haven’t considered adding a touch of the mystical to your decision-making. This may not resonate with some of you, but since I’m a practicing Christian, I believe that there is a supernatural power - God - who can help me make better decisions than I ever could on my own. And, because of that belief, it would be silly of me not to tap into that. To that end, I’ve found George Müller’s approach to seeking God’s will both challenging and inspiring. Müller is known for running multiple orphanages in the 1800s. I’ll include a quick quote from the Wikipedia article that shows why I think he is worth emulating.

Müller never made requests for financial support, nor did he go into debt, even though the five homes [for orphans] cost more than £100,000 to build. Many times, he received unsolicited food donations only hours before they were needed to feed the children, further strengthening his faith in God. Müller was in constant prayer that God touched the hearts of donors to make provisions for the orphans. For example, on one well-documented occasion, thanks was given for breakfast when all the children were sitting at the table even though there was nothing to eat in the house. As they finished praying, the baker knocked on the door with sufficient fresh bread to feed everyone, and the milkman gave them plenty of fresh milk because his cart had broken down in front of the orphanage.

His approach to making decisions (quoted here) includes six steps which all are designed to determine God’s will in a situation. In summary, these steps are,

  1. Empty yourself of your own will and desires (because you’re seeking God’s will, not your own)
  2. Do not rely entirely on your own thoughts or even thoughts you think may be from God
  3. Consult the Word of God, the Bible
  4. Take into account circumstances that you think God has orchestrated (providential circumstances)
  5. Ask God to reveal His will in prayer
  6. Seek peace in the decision after praying on it 2-3 times

The steps are straightforward, but number 1 is especially difficult. It’s no small thing to approach a decision without considering my own desires. I have just begun to take these steps when I’m making a decision. I have already found that it provides some clarity, but I look forward to integrating it with the rest of these new decision-making techniques I am learning. If you believe in the supernatural, as well, I encourage you to consider how you might integrate it into your decisions; I’ll be interested to hear if you do.

These four elements of decision-making - finding a single, strong reason; considering network effects; making decision-making systematic; and seeking spiritual guidance - all strike me as important. I wanted to create a system that would incorporate each element. To begin designing this system, I asked myself what the ideal decision survey would look like for me. This is what I wrote down:

These questions will prompt me to consider all the elements of decision-making that I’ve been learning. I plan to use them to help me make wiser decisions and regularly evaluate past decisions to make sure my decisions are producing the desired results. After designing the survey, I needed to plan how to use it. The process I designed is to keep a list of big decisions that I need to make, set aside time - likely once a week - to work through the survey for the decisions on the list, and once a quarter retrospect on decisions made and their results.

I challenge you to evaluate your decision-making. What do you consider when you make decisions? How do you evaluate your decisions and improve your decision-making? Try taking my survey and system as a starting point and adjusting them for your use. And when you do let me know how it goes.