Making the Right Decisions

Greetings all,

I had started wondering if making decisions was an issue for me because there are times when I feel I am indecisive and unclear about what to do next. So I had thought that maybe I'll take out a book on Decision theory, which I managed to find.

I am up to Chapter 6 of a book with 13 chapters and I can already tell I probably will not like the rest of this. The book is called "The Right Decision" by James Stein, PhD. He is a math professor.

So he starts out by saying that people who are successful typically make good decisions in life so it makes sense to strengthen this faculty in yourself so that you can make better decisions. He constructs these quizzes and gives you points on which answer you give. Obviously, the best decision is the one with the most points.

He's used some examples from history to create the quizzes from. I liked taking the quizzes because I'm a nerd so taking quizzes makes me feel smart. Some of the questions, I chose the best answer and if you choose the best answer, it's worth 5 points. Second best choice can be worth 1-3 points and the worst choice is worth -1 to 1. Some questions I didn't make the right choice but I didn't agree with his line of thinking and I actually think I made the right decision, inspite of what he thought was the right decision.

He is a critic of Malcolm Gladwell's book The Power of Thinking Without Thinking and he briefly mentions that people don't like thinking because it's hard work so that's probably why the above book was so popular (or maybe he's just jealous of MG?). I totally agree with this since thinking does require effort and it's important to use this thinking muscle and push it. I'm sure most of my readers know that I am into philosophy, particularly the philosophy known as Anthroposophy and I think reading some of these books have really trained my thinking faculty so I think I can probably out think most people. But I have to be in the mood, because sometimes I just can't be bothered to tear apart people's faulty belief structures. Mainly because it would take some time and I'd probably have to care... and frankly I could think of better ways to spend my time.

One of the questions is based on history and is about Christopher Columbus and in this question, you are the queen of Spain and it asks if you should fund him. Logically it would not be a good decision to go with this suggestion of this man who wants to sail to Asia, especially since at that time people thought the world was flat and it was a crazy notion. The correct decision according to the quiz was to turn him down. However the reality of history was that the Queen did say yes and well we all know what happened from there. America was discovered, yada yada yada...

I think his whole book loses credibility because he himself says sometimes the wrong decisions, lead to the right results. So then working on my decision making skills is not really going to help me?

Who knew what the hell the Queen of Spain was thinking and what made her decide to think this whole Columbus voyage could work out.

Since I haven't read the rest of the book, I skimmed through the remaining and it doesn't look like he's going to explain this issue of why sometimes illogical decisions can be good decisions.

I think his book loses all its value because he's just contradicted himself. You can't say successful people make successful decisions because in the above case, success occurred with a bad decision. There are countless other examples in history where people are trying to discover one thing and accidentally discover something else. So making the 'right' decisions, which really are logical decisions, do not necessarily lead to success.

I got this book from the library so I don't actually own it. Which I think was a good decision.