1-Sentence-Summary: The Decision-Making Blueprint is a comprehensive guide to making better decisions, avoiding errors and expensive mistakes, learning how to automate your mind to choose better alternatives, and ultimately, improving your life by upgrading the decision-making process.
Read in: 4 minutes
In economics, people are defined as “home economicus’’ beings, which implies that the nature of a human being is to be self-centered, analytical, and on top of all, rational. However, real-life situations have proved numerous times that this theory is in fact, partially wrong.
We are programmed to survive. This is the reason why everyone seeks their best interest at heart. However, the way we do that is questionable. Humans oftentimes lack rationality in their decisions. There are times when we make decisions knowing that they will harm our future.
This is because people make systematic errors in their thinking. Our brain is programmed to keep us alive, not seek our well-being. For example, we feel twice as bad if we lose something as if we gain the exact amount of an item. Our loss aversion prejudice, along with many other biases and fallacies are just some of the faulty thinking traits that we as humans have.
The Decision-Making Blueprint by Patrik Edblad teaches you how to think better and find new ways of making decisions that benefit your well-being. By taking charge of your conscious approach to the decision-making process, you can actively improve your life and achieve more successful endeavors.
Here are my three favorite lessons from the book:
- The confirmation bias and the self-serving bias can seriously impact your rationality.
- Our preference for the status quo can steal away great opportunities.
- The 80/20 principle can help you be more efficient in your decisions.
Now, let’s take each lesson one by one and analyze them in detail. Ready? Here we go!
Lesson 1: Humans have a tendency to discredit everything that doesn’t support their opinion and take credit only for success.
In general, people tend to look for ways to support their beliefs or values, even though they may be wrong or inaccurate. We are naturally inclined to look for information. This is to back up our beliefs. This is what the confirmation bias stated.
Despite being shown facts and reliable sources of information on a certain topic, people choose to disagree with them if they do not fit their preset perspective. This bias can harm one’s decision-making process and even the capacity to analyze certain topics objectively. This is why it’s particularly important to spot this faulty trait.
Another harmful cognitive prejudice is the self-serving bias. This one interferes with our well-being. It states that people tend to take responsibility for successful outcomes, but fail to do so for negative events. This fallacy can negatively impact one’s morale, as they might present a different persona to the outside world, feeling as if their true personality isn’t good enough as it is.
Although these biases are impossible to overcome fully, acknowledging them and developing critical thinking can help one diminish them. We are error-program. We are not perfect. Working on them by being objective and analytical of yourself will help you improve your way of thinking, and implicitly, the decision-making process.
Lesson 2: People are naturally inclined to prefer the status quo, but that can be harmful to the future.
As humans, we have a tendency to react negatively to change and maintain the status quo. This happens because we are program to preserve energy. The losses from potential change count more than the success from potential gains.
Therefore, people choose to keep things still by going to the same restaurants because of familiarity. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as it can help save time and energy, but it can also impede us from seizing opportunities.
This bias has a huge impact on our decision-making process. You can fall prey to manipulative people by being naturally incline in choosing the default option. You miss out on great potential benefits from other outcomes. To avoid that, you should first acknowledge that you have a psychological commitment to the familiar.
Poor decisions can indeed go worse than simple inaction, but that’s not always the case. Whenever you are presented with an opportunity and feel like passing on it, ask yourself if you feel that way due to your preference for familiar, comfortable, and the default option, or because it is truly not something you’d like to try out.
Lesson 3: Applying the Pareto principle will help you make smarter decisions in your life.
Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto came up with a brilliant discovery: a minority of the things we do count for the majority of the results. More specifically, 80% of an outcome comes from 20% of the cause. This principle serves as a benchmark for governments analyzing wealth or population distribution. This can be applicable to businesses analyzing their revenue sources, and even individuals in their daily activities.
This valuable principle can help you spend your time more efficiently, and become a more productive version of yourself. Start by asking yourself questions like, which 20% of your relationships are responsible for 80% of your happiness? Or what is it that you do 20% of your time that accounts for 80% of your results for that day?
Doing so will help you get a better overview of your life. It can be the starting point of your time management analysis. You realize what it is that occupies most of your time, you can actively choose what to do with that information, whether to change your daily habits or drop some of them.
When you learn to use this principle as a guideline for your actions, you will notice that your productivity rate increases. It also improves your decision-making. You’d rather spend less time doing valuable things that will influence 80% of your day. Rather than just trying to stay plugged in continuously, but achieving poorer results, right?
The Decision-Making Blueprint Review
This book is a hands-on guide to making smarter decisions. It can improve your way of thinking, and achieve overall enhanced results in your undertakings. Patrik Edblad offers practical advice on how to get rid of flawed thinking traits. As well as cognitive biases through simple, easy-to-implement tactics. Following the guidelines from The Decision Making Blueprint and sticking to them rigorously will have a positive long-lasting effect on your life and on how you form relationships with those around you.
Who would I recommend The Decision-Making Blueprint summary to?
The 30-year-old wanted to improve their professional and personal life, the 22-year-old wants to start making better decisions after finishing college, and the 45-year-old employee feels stuck at their job and wants to turn their life around.
Last Updated on February 13, 2023
