Creating Great Choices

Chapter 2

How We Choose

We’re blind to our blindness. We have very little idea of how little we know.

—DANIEL KAHNEMAN

Let’s face it—most of us make lots of bad decisions, whether it’s launching a new product that ultimately fails or choosing to rewatch that episode of Game of Thrones instead of going to the gym. Knowing that we tend to fall prey to bad decision making isn’t enough to keep us from making the same bad decisions again. If we are to have any hope of consistently making better decisions, we need to understand how and why our current decision-making processes fail us.

In part, our decisions often fail because of glitches in our thinking, including deep-seated biases that produce troubling lapses in logic. Each of us falls prey ...