Give Me 30 Minutes and You Will Never Struggle With a Decision Again

Making good decisions is hard because we’re flooded with information and prone to stress, distractions, and cognitive overload. On top of that, we’re swayed by unconscious biases, gut instincts, and flawed reasoning. Here’s quick help for when you get stuck at a crossroads.

Decision-making skills play a key role in every part of life, from professional advancement to personal relationships. Therefore, the ability to pick the best options available can measurably improve your career, family life, and even happiness. But when you’re in the moment, it can be hard to know how to approach a major decision.

In our master guide to making better decisions, we’ll cover advice on decision-making from popular science and psychology authors like Malcolm Gladwell (Blink) and Chip and Dan Heath (Decisive). We’ll arrange their views into concrete principles you can use to analyze a decision, approach it from an informed perspective, and make your decision objectively. We’ll also explain how each of these strategies helps to improve your decision-making process.

In The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz contends that the vast array of choices presented to us leaves us stressed and indecisive. To lift this burden, Schwartz, a professor of social theory and social action, recommends we learn how to better navigate our choices, from groceries to health insurance.

Schwartz’s work combines psychology, economics, and his personal experiences. In this guide, we’ll examine the types of choices we face, the challenges of making choices, how excessive choices make these challenges more difficult, and how to live with expanded choice. Our guide adds scientific and cultural context to Schwartz’s ideas, plus updates on how choice has grown since the book’s publication.

Making good decisions is hard because we’re flooded with information and prone to stress, distractions, and cognitive overload. On top of that, we’re swayed by unconscious biases, gut instincts, and flawed reasoning. Here’s quick help for when you get stuck at a crossroads.

Decision-making skills play a key role in every part of life, from professional advancement to personal relationships. Therefore, the ability to pick the best options available can measurably improve your career, family life, and even happiness. But when you’re in the moment, it can be hard to know how to approach a major decision.

In our master guide to making better decisions, we’ll cover advice on decision-making from popular science and psychology authors like Malcolm Gladwell (Blink) and Chip and Dan Heath (Decisive). We’ll arrange their views into concrete principles you can use to analyze a decision, approach it from an informed perspective, and make your decision objectively. We’ll also explain how each of these strategies helps to improve your decision-making process.

Our lives are full of big decisions, yet our minds are wired to make bad ones. Authors Dan and Chip Heath claim that we make poor decisions due to our biases and illogical ways of thinking. In Decisive, they draw on psychology research to argue that it’s possible to overcome the cognitive flaws that impair decision-making. In this guide, we’ll walk you through the Heath brothers’ four-step process for improving our choices. You’ll learn how to:

• Overcome biases that distort your decision-making
• Develop options that you hadn’t considered before
• Gather credible information to inform your choices
• Put your emotions into perspective during tough decisions
• Prepare for a decision’s best-case and worst-case scenarios

As we explore this process, we’ll compare the authors’ ideas on decision-making to those of other experts on choice, such as Barry Schwartz, Annie Duke, and Daniel Kahneman. We’ll also contextualize the book’s ideas using research on how culture and society influence decision-making. Furthermore, we’ll supplement the Heath brothers’ strategies with actionable steps.

Former Vedic monk and award-winning content creator Jay Shetty claims that the route to happiness and fulfillment is to Think Like a Monk. According to him, monks are the calmest and happiest people in the world because they live with a sense of purpose that aligns with their true, inner selves.

Fortunately, you don’t need to cut yourself off from the modern world or shave your head to benefit from this mindset. Shetty draws from his experiences as a monk, ancient spiritual texts, and the latest psychological research to transform abstract concepts into actionable methods you can easily incorporate into your life.

In this guide, we’ve compared and contrasted Shetty’s key concepts with up-to-date psychological research and advice. In addition, we’ve expanded on his methods with actionable ideas from other self-improvement practitioners and psychologists.

When you experience a negative or stressful event, do you think through your responses carefully and act exactly as you want to? Or do you find yourself caught up in the emotions of the moment, acting in ways that you later feel embarrassed or ashamed of?

In Emotional Agility, clinical psychologist and management consultant Susan David explains that most people react instinctively to their perceptions of events—which are based on emotional, often-untrue narratives explaining why those events took place. David argues that you can break free of these controlling narratives by practicing emotional agility—seeing events and your emotions objectively so you can live with purpose and clarity.

In this guide, we’ll explore David's strategies and the importance of living according to your values so you can create the life you truly want instead of one ruled by your emotions and the desires of others. In commentary, we’ll explain the origins of David’s ideas, the scientific evidence behind them, and how to apply them to your life.

Making good decisions is hard because we’re flooded with information and prone to stress, distractions, and cognitive overload. On top of that, we’re swayed by unconscious biases, gut instincts, and flawed reasoning. Here’s quick help for when you get stuck at a crossroads.

Anxiety is sneaky. It lives in our thoughts and habits, and it can show up as a stomachache or a 3 a.m. Netflix binge. But according to Dr. Judson Brewer, you can recognize and counteract anxiety using mindfulness—the practice of paying close attention to the present moment without analyzing or judging it.

In Unwinding Anxiety, Brewer explains how anxiety becomes a habit and how it spawns additional habits that only make things worse. Brewer draws on his background as a psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and mindfulness researcher to show why mindfulness succeeds where traditional methods like willpower, substitution, and avoidance fail.

In this guide, we’ll walk through Brewer’s three-step method for treating anxiety while expanding on the techniques he mentions and offering some additional psychological insights from experts such as Daniel Goleman and Brené Brown.

Decision-making skills play a key role in every part of life, from professional advancement to personal relationships. Therefore, the ability to pick the best options available can measurably improve your career, family life, and even happiness. But when you’re in the moment, it can be hard to know how to approach a major decision.

In our master guide to making better decisions, we’ll cover advice on decision-making from popular science and psychology authors like Malcolm Gladwell (Blink) and Chip and Dan Heath (Decisive). We’ll arrange their views into concrete principles you can use to analyze a decision, approach it from an informed perspective, and make your decision objectively. We’ll also explain how each of these strategies helps to improve your decision-making process.