John Adair's 100 Greatest Ideas for Smart Decision Making

Idea 43: Practice makes perfect

To be good at anything at all requires a lot of practice, and to be really good at taking decisions you have to have plenty of practice at taking decisions.

Lord Thomson of Fleet, Canadian media entrepreneur

What the practice of decision making and the consequent experience does is to inform your depth mind so that it works much more quickly and more accurately. As Zen Master Shunryu Suzuki said, ‘In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few.’

In his autobiography After I was Sixty (1975), Lord Thomson of Fleet wrote:

I cannot explain this scientifically, but I was entirely convinced that, through the years, in my brain as in a computer, I had stored details of the ...