Making Decisions: How To Make Better Life Choices

Airbnb began as a weekend project when the founders sent an email offering their living-room air mattress to hotelless attendees of a major design conference. Facebook started when Mark Zuckerberg built a clone of ConnectU over the weekend and told everyone in his dorm about it. Most of us think we are never ready for what we want: being in a relationship, living in another country, or starting a business. But the best way to make it happen is to start immediately.

One Sunday morning early in my career, I arrived at work to find a colleague of mine already there. We were working on a critical piece of software for an upcoming covert operation. He approached me shortly after I sat down at my desk. “That code you were writing was supposed to be done two days ago,” he said. “The operation is tonight, and we can’t go without you. You’ve put the whole thing in jeopardy.”

For me, writing is a wonderful way to go deep on a problem I’m struggling with. As my friend and fellow author, Gretchen Rubin told me, “Research is me search.” When I’m struggling with one thing or another, my first step is to think through the problem myself. But there are still problems so tricky that they take even more thinking through.

Nir’s Note: Eric Johnson teaches at the Columbia Business School where he is the Director of the Center for Decision Sciences. He has authored some of the most influential research on decision-making, with papers published in leading scientific journals and articles...

Nir’s Note: Entrepreneur, speaker and consultant, Dorie Clark is a recognized leader in the field of executive education, a topic she teaches at Duke University Fuqua School of Business and Columbia Business School. She has developed over 20 LinkedIn Learning courses...

In our search for easy answers, we give up control.The evidence is overwhelming: we are far more powerful than the technology that is supposedly mind-controlling us. It’s not even close. As I’ve discussed in other articles, we need to give ourselves more credit....

A classic survivor test shows us how the illusion of control can sidetrack us from our mission when things get uncomfortableLet’s try something. Imagine you’ve just crash-landed somewhere in the Sonoran Desert, deep in the American Southwest. Though the aircraft is...

Ashley Stahl is a counter-terrorism professional turned career coach, speaker, and, most recently, author of You Turn, a book about getting unstuck, discovering your career direction, and designing your dream job. Through her two viral TEDx talks speeches (here and...

A 69-year-old man began experiencing a persistent cough, chest discomfort, and weight loss. His physician recommended a radiograph of his chest to identify the root of the issue, which revealed a large tumor. A biopsy confirmed the worst: malignant thymoma, a cancer hiding between the lungs consuming the patient’s body from the inside out. Three and a half years earlier, he’d had the same chest radiograph done as part of a routine examination. The patient decided to sue the doctor who missed the tumor. Was this an example of hindsight bias?

How should we make decisions in life? Dr. Gleb Tsipursky, a behavioral economist and cognitive neuroscientist, says that whatever you do, Never Go With Your Gut. It’s such bold advice that Dr. Tsipursky decided to make it the title of his latest book. In this...

If you looked up the word “polymath” in the dictionary, you may see a picture of Ozan Varol. He teaches at Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Oregon and has written a widely cited book on comparative politics. Most surprisingly, however, he was part of the NASA...

Everyone should be wearing a face mask now, whether they are sick or healthy. We can make our own masks to ensure we're not taking them away from health care workers. In several Asian countries that are successfully lowering the number of infections from Covid-19,...