Table of Contents
A. Decision Making in day-to-day life
If you go to Paradise, you will start smelling the Aroma of Biriyani. When normal daily dishes are cooked at home, you may not even be aware of the smell. Most of these processes are either habit, intuition-driven, or driven by life’s experience and so on.
Because their effect on life in the coming years is not that significant, we don’t care.
B. Professional decisions
Everyone wants to make better professional decisions like approving a project or sales or not, and therefore there are thousands of books, theories, models, and research on this topic.
When it comes to the industry, we prefer to think of ourselves as rational(overlooking our inherent irrationality). So we try to come up with data, charts, and theories to appear smart and taking “learned decisions.”
However, the general consense is “We take 10 decisions, 8 will always fail, focus on the 2 that succeed and make them count.”
C. Critical decisions
Some decisions such as investing money, marriage, and starting a carrier are more serious decisions. Because they can make or break the next several decades of life. These are the ones that get us struck.
There are adventure-loving individuals too, who love taking risks to get maximum rewards. However, even then a key consideration is not losing. Who wants to go to war to die, or Everest to fall?
D. Why we make mistakes
If you are growing in life due to a decision, that is successful, else we consider it to be a bad decision. But the outcome(other than death) is always perceived emotionally.
E. Our brain’s biases
So, irrespective of the individual, our brain keeps two key considerations while choosing anything(not dying, and not feeling bad for a sustained period of time).
Life was developed in water.
The feeling is a right-brain phenomenon.
So, one is likely to choose a solution that will less likely cause one to die. (Apple equates privacy as death-like. Try to study their focus on security vs features. AI is dangerous for humans: so better be its friends! Yea Elon?).
F. Experiments and parallels
In 2019, psychologists showed that those who were given a glass of water did cognitive tasks much better than those with 12 hours of no water.
Brain stimulation studies have shown that when you stimulate the right brain before decision-making, you take better decisions.
G. Final 2 Tools for better decisions
1. Always drink more water before taking any decision and see the magic.
2. Keep emotional objects like your child’s photo or a small plant, or a God’s photo whatever you are emotional with on the right side of your desk.
As you take more successful small decisions with this setup, you would observe that your brain will start becoming much more stable in decision anxieties.
Many successful men keep their child’s photo in their wallet because it stays in right. Many decisions are taken over tea or drink because?
H. Conclusion
Most people who start seeing success in personal and professional life develop various superstitions. A deeper understanding of these superstitions would give you hints as to how the right brain or emotional pathway stimulation is key to these superstitions. Even if you have taken a decision that is not making you feel bad for such long, it will not appear bad.
Taking baths, and drinking water before any call can significantly lower those decision anxieties. Coc is not too good for health, but Buffet has a Coke every day. Again a hydration habit. Rahul Dravid wore the right thigh pad first, again a right-side stimulation habit.
There is a reason why the pen pocket is on the right and the watch is on the left. Watch changes all the time and creates hurry. Choices like not giving the pen to others come from these inherent brain patterns.
Whenever you are afraid, you will feel a sense of dryness. When you will make wrong decisions, you will feel drained. In Indian societies, the husband stays on the right of the wife, for social significance that the man is her chosen one(because she leads the family in social settings). In office functions, the wife is preferred to be on the right.
Use fundamentals and get better.
Taking decisions is like Riding a horse, where horse is the emotion, and the leash is the logic; you loose the leash and horse will be uncontrollable; you tighten the leash too much, and the horse won’t move
Robert Green, Author
