Use what Dan and Chip Heath call the WRAP process for making and evaluating your decisions.

1. W – Widen your options. Consider at least 2 or 3 other options – not too many. Ask yourself can I do this OR that. Is there a better way? Too much focusing on your current choice prevents you from seeing other, perhaps better options. Also, think ‘AND’ and not ‘OR’ when framing your options. Consider what you would do if the options you are considering disappear. Ask your friend who may present you with a wider view. Do not allow your bias for confirmation of your decision to gather only self serving information.
2. R – Reality test your Assumptions – to overcome your own confirmation bias. Ask yourself what would have to be true for this option to be the very best choice? Force yourself to consider the very opposite of your instincts.
3. A – Attain distance before deciding – to overcome the effect of short term emotions. Ask what your successor or your friend would do in your position? Consider the outside view as against your own close-up / inside view. Where possible try small experiments to test your view before jumping in.
4. P – Prepare to be wrong – to give your decision the best chance to survive in an uncertain future. Try not to be over confident about your choice.

Also, as Suzy Welch advises, evaluate all your choices by viewing each through the 10-10-10 perspective. Project yourself into the future and ask yourself from that perspective what would your choice bring to you, say ten minutes from making it, or ten months or ten years. If the choice still seems the right one from such perspective, then do make it. This differs from a ‘Pre-mortem’ as it evaluates the results in an unbiased way for success or failure. Try to ‘book end’ your decisions by anticipating and preparing for the best and worst results.

If you address all your choices on the basis as given above and take full responsibility for your own life you will make the right choices and therefore will live a full, meaningful, happy and harmonious life free of regrets.

Of course, making a choice, even a right choice, does not imply that the consequences will be what you desire. Factors beyond your control can lead to different consequences. The car you are travelling in could break down, delaying you for an important meeting and so on. You make the choice and God decides the consequences. Even in such instances the responsibility still remains yours to bear and to make further choices to rectify the situation as possible. Your choosing to keep a positive attitude will help.

All this requires us to understand what is needed to establish and maintain such relationships and to achieve success at work, to realize that, as Eliyahu Goldratt writes – “The more complicated the situation seems to be, the simpler the solution must be… and if the situation is based on human interactions, you probably already have enough knowledge to begin with.”

Such an understanding will emerge out of being prepared, knowing the cause and effects that govern a situation. If you are not prepared, you will not recognize the many opportunities that life presents to you and will pass your life waiting for good luck to be presented to you on a silver platter, all the time feeling that life did not give you a chance and that you are constrained by circumstances and are powerless to change them – a state of unhappiness.

“Most humans manage to squander their free time, as free time makes them dysfunctional, lazy and unmotivated-the busier they get, the more active they are at other tasks.” – Nassim.N.Taleb

“Good luck is when preparation meets opportunity” – said Seneca. The corollary according to Goldratt is – “Bad luck is when reality meets lack of preparation”. Also, as someone said – “It is surprising how luckier you seem to get the harder you work”.

Everyone has tremendous brain power but not every one chooses to properly use that brain power. True freedom of choice is the choice to invest your time, effort and resources to overcome the obstacles you face in life, in relationships and work, and to identify the really key issues or causes and think differently, to find simple solutions that enable you to do so.

People look for complicated solutions to what they persist in seeing as complex problems and give up too easily. Unprepared to identify the real problem, they justify their situation as being impossible to deal with and channel their energies into dealing with less important things, seeking to boost their morale by small achievements.

Issac Newton recognized ‘Inherent simplicity’ as existing in all parts of reality, as being the foundation of all Science, saying – “Nature is exceedingly simple and harmonious with itself ”. This is true of all human interactions too. Of course that does not mean that reality is not complex. It only means that all complexity arises from just a few elements and their cause and effect relationships. So the best way to resolve a problem is to understand the root cause of the conflict, stop seeing such a conflict as being capable of resolution only by a compromise. Instead seek to examine the assumptions underlying that conflict and remove or revise them to eliminate the conflict and thus resolve the problem.

To think clearly, especially about relationships, both personal and business, you need to take a look at your tendency to blame the other party for any misunderstanding or conflict, a sure way to ruin the harmony in a relationship. While harmony potentially exists in any relationship, most relationships are not harmonious because most people do not bother to find and actually implement what is needed to make them so, to ensure that both parties get what each wants from that relationship.

Always choose with a clear understanding of what that choice entails.

As Gerd Gigerenzer writes in ‘Risk Savvy’-

There are two ways to arrive at a choice.

1. ‘Satisficing’: That is setting an aspiration level and then choosing the first option that is satisfactory; that is good enough and the search can then be terminated.
2. ‘Maximizing’: That is trying to find the best choice to make, or best value to get, and nothing else. After going through any number of options you, in a world where much is unknown, can still never be sure whether it really was the best, or that there would be a better option round the corner. Maximizing can lead to fragile solutions and can be a direct route toward unhappiness.

Since in an uncertain world there is no way to find the best, your best bet is to early on clearly decide what would meet your needs and then settle for that choice which is ‘good enough’. Strive to define your aspirations with a maximum of five, or better, with three or even less parameters or attributes. There is no reason to search for any more alternatives once you have got what you needed.

Learning to live with a good enough choice, even with the possibility that there could be something better out there, is necessary in an uncertain world. Always remember that ‘The better is the enemy of the good’. The ‘Better’ is the ‘bird in the bush’ or the ‘fish that got away’, it is only a wishful prospect, while the ‘Good’ is the ‘bird in hand’, the ‘fish that you caught’, the reality of which can actually meet your needs in the present.

Studies indicate that people who rely on aspiration rules, the ‘satisficers’, tend to be more optimistic and have higher self-esteem than ‘maximizers’. The latter strive to excel to an unattainable perfectionism, and fall prey to depression and self-blame.

Food choice, shopping, watching TV etc, are some of the small decisions one faces, but trying to ‘maximize’ even each such choice can swallow an enormous amount of time while still leaving one restless and dissatisfied. Now imagine if everyone tried to ‘maximize’, in choice of mate or employment, to find the perfect partner or the perfect job and nothing less. That would be a recipe for disaster.

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