Decision Making

I am a famously decisive person, for better and worse. I tend to know exactly what the best answer is quickly and then act on it without much second thought or hesitation.

Even the times I'm humming and hawing, I secretly suspect it's some sort of performative thing that I feel like I should do because that assigns weight to the decision in a way that's "fair" or "useful" and in reality I knew what I should have done days ago. I think I ask other people's opinions because that's just what people do and not because it's a thing I usually actually need or care about.

But how can we build a framework around this? I would just say it's intuition, but there's definitely other things at play here, and so I wanted to start a list as they come up:

The Aggressive Offload

This one requires you to not care about the outcome, which is a position I think we find ourselves in a lot if we're truly honest about it. A lot of decisions simply don't matter at all.

An example from today: there's a mountain bike on kijiji that I could be interested in wanting, but I don't really need it and there'll be other similar deals all the time so it's not make-or-break.

If I were to make the decision myself there's a whole loop of going back and forth, but if I let the seller make the decision I can offload the entire process.

So my real goal is "what are the conditions that would make this sale a no-brainer?"

The bike is worth maybe $1300 new, it seems to be in great used shape, he was selling it for $1000 and then down to $800 which is probably a very fair price. It's been on the market for a few weeks now, so no one else has swooped in on that yet.

For $800 I'm on the fence. But if it were, say, $500 it'd be an instant "I'll be there in 5 minutes" sale. Easy.

So somewhere in between those two numbers is the threshold of no-brainer sale price.

I sent him a message and offered $700.

If he takes it, I got the bike for a good deal and I'm happy to buy it.

If he doesn't, I can either decide to pay $800 because I realized that I actually really want it (also useful information) or I realized that I don't care that much and can simply not buy it.

Either way, I didn't have to do really much of anything on my own. I've decided what the conditions are that would make the buying decision easier and have offered them to the seller to accept or not.

You can see where making an easy, arbitrary decision is quick and actionable and reduces or prevents the entire other loop of tricky fence-sitting decision making at face value.

This is a pretty hustler type of mentality, actually. Reworking reality to stack it in your favor.