February 2006
Intermediate to advanced
332 pages
9h 3m
English
Content preview from Mind Performance HacksBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 5. Decision Making
Whether you're deciding which house or which hamburger to buy, you make decisions every day, if not every minute. It therefore behooves you to learn more about the art and science of decision making.
Because the hacks in this chapter rely on the analysis of future events, they use a lot of math, but don't let that scare you. You can often use the math hacks from Chapter 4 to simplify things.
This chapter addresses the following questions:
How important is your problem [Hack #44]?
How long will it last [Hack #45]?
What steps can you take to solve it [Hack #46] and [Hack #47]?
What can you do when all analysis fails [Hack #48]?
Perhaps most importantly, what do you do when you've got that Friday 7:30 feeling in your bones [Hack #49]?
Hack #44. Foresee Important Problems
Learn to foresee the most significant problems you'll face by multiplying the probability of an event by its impact on human-friendly seven-point scales. The result is a final estimate of importance on a scale of 0 to 100.
This decision-making hack is similar to the technique known as bulletproofing1 but with a much finer resolution and ability to compare concerns. The idea of bulletproofing is to do "negative brainstorming" about all the things that could possibly go wrong with a project, and then to rank them by priority on a chart labeled "Minor problem" and "Major problem" on one axis, and "Unlikely" and "Very likely" on the other axis. Figure 5-1 ranks four things that could go wrong for an average ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.