Noreena Hertz - Eyes Wide Open - How to Make Smart Decisions in a Confusing World

What it is impossible to do in this book, however, is give you one over-arching, catch-all strategy to follow. This isn’t about ‘Blinking’, or ‘Nudging’, or trusting ‘the Wisdom of Crowds’, and leaving it at that.35 I don’t believe there is a one-size-fits-all decision-making template that can work for all of us, at all times. Human life is too complex for that, especially nowadays.

Instead, what I hope to deliver is a ‘decision-making tool kit’. A kit that will enable you to interrogate your own decision-making habits and investigate the information you are given. A kit with the tools that will empower you to make decisions in radically different ways from how you may have been making them until now.

Because ultimately, this book is about empowering you.

Empowering you so that you are able to get past the spin and evaluate the underlying substance. Empowering you so that you can challenge conventional wisdoms and determine what to replace them with. Empowering you so that you are not cowed by authority figures or over-confident experts, and are able to assess their opinions as you would the opinions of any others.

Empowering you so that you’re not ashamed to ask for help when you need to, but have the skills to be able to identify who best to get this help from, and how. Empowering you to be able to look into your own psyche, so that you can identify ways in which you may be sabotaging your own decision-making.

The goal of this book is to empower all of us to become more confident, more independent and wiser thinkers and decision-makers. To become people who neither blindly accept the dictates of others nor unquestioningly follow our own initial instincts or analysis – people able to face the world with eyes wide open, and make smart choices and decisions for ourselves.

• Commit to becoming an Empowered Decision-Maker.

• See the Ten Steps as the tool kit to help you in this quest.The Tips that follow will get you thinking – they will get you started on your journey. We will develop them further as the book progresses.

• Become aware that we have to make over 10,000 decisions a day.Begin to think about which of these you actually need to make, and whether you are really prioritising the important ones.

• Start thinking about how it is you make decisions.Do you consult others and gather a range of opinions, or do you take everything upon yourself? Do you make decisions quickly? Or do you tend to want to mull options over first?

• Start noting who or what typically influences the choices that you make.

• Acknowledge that smart decision-making needs time and space.Begin to think about how you can reshape your environment to achieve this. How can you limit distractions and disruptions? Can you take technology-free Sabbaths? Can you initiate a new policy at work that limits who is cc’d on emails and under which circumstances?

• Start considering how you have typically viewed experts and conventional big-hitters until now.Do you tend to accept their views and ideas without question?

• Ask yourself more generally who it is you trust and why.

• Contemplate your current strategies for dealing with the digital deluge.Think about the short cuts you take, and how you determine which information to base your decisions on. Begin thinking about how these may be impacting on the quality of your thinking.

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