Is one of your 2023 goals to try and become a better decision maker? If it is, I have collected some of the best books on decision making to level up your skills.
According to the Program of Negotiation at Harvard Law School, “Making smart choices is a fundamental life skill, relevant to everyone: business people, doctors, lawyers, teachers, students, parents, young, and old. Your decisions shape the course of your professional career and the quality of your personal life. Yet few people learn real decision-making skills.” [Quote Link]
Check out this list of 12 outstanding books on decision making that will improve your skills:
- Thinking Fast And Slow
- Decisive: How To Make Better Decisions In Life And Work
- Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
- Outliers: The Story Of Success
- The Paradox Of Choice: Why More Is Less
- Atomic Habits: An Easy And Proven Way To Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones
- How To Lie With Statistics
- Smart Choices: A Practical Guide To Making Better Decisions
- Stop Overthinking: 23 Techniques to Relieve Stress, Stop Negative Spirals, Declutter Your Mind, and Focus on the Present
- Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
- Don’t Overthink It: Make Easier Decisions, Stop Second Guessing, And Bring More Joy To Your Life
- The Decision Maker’s Playbook: How To Make Data Meaningful, Meanings Actionable, And Actions Reality
(I get commissions for purchases made through links in this post.)
For more in depth descriptions, check out the rest of the post below!
Thinking Fast And Slow
By Daniel Kahneman
Memorable quote: “We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.”
What it’s about: This book explains how two brain systems are always competing for control of your behavior and activities, how this leads to mistakes in memory, judgment, and decision-making. Most importantly, it guides you through what you can do to fix it!
What you will learn:
- Problem-solving, decision-making, and behavioral economics for those without psychology degrees.
- The brain’s two primary systems of thinking:
- System 1: Fast and Intuitive
- System 2: Deliberate and logical
- How overconfidence can lead to biased conclusions that often lead to outright errors
- Humans are naturally storytellers which can cause difficulty when comprehending statistical or numerical data
- The power of narratives and their impact on decision making
Decisive: How To Make Better Choices in Life and Work
By Chip and Dan Heath
Memorable quote: “Success emerges from the quality of the decisions we make and the quantity of luck we receive. We can’t control luck. But we can control the way we make choices.”
What it’s about: This book shares hints and techniques for improving our personal decision-making. It begins by pointing out how bad of decision-makers we truly are and how, if we could become more aware of our decision-making process, start making better ones.
What you will learn:
- How to not artificially limit your choices when you get stuck making a decision
- How to pursue many options when problem-solving instead of limiting yourself to one
- How to look at the solutions someone else has created for the same problem
- To play devil’s advocate against your decision to reduce any unconscious bias
- The impact of running a small experiment to test your decisions
Blink: The Power Of Thinking Without Thinking
By Malcom Gladwell
Memorable quote: “The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter.”
What it’s about: Blink is a book about how we think without thinking, about choices that seem to be made in an instant-in the blink of an eye-that aren’t as simple as they seem.
A few questions explored in the book are, why are some people brilliant decision makers, while others are consistently inept? Why do some people follow their instincts and win, while others end up stumbling into error?
What you will learn:
- How intuitive judgements can sometimes be superior to conscious ones
- We make conclusions and judgements in the blink of an eye far more often than we realize
- How people’s decisions are tremendously impacted and influenced by our unconscious selves
- How stress can influence and drive us to the wrong judgements
- How market research may not always be the best indicator of consumer behavior
Outliers: The Story of Success
By Malcom Gladwell
Memorable quote: “Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.”
What it’s about: This book delves deeply into learning about outliers in society – the top athletes, businessmen, politicians, etc. and outlines that factors that contributed to their success. While we typically think that success is a product of talent and hard work, Gladwell explains that these are not exclusively the contributing factors. Luck, culture, upbringing and more also play a huge role. By seeing the big picture of what constitutes success, you’ll have more information to make better decisions and achieve your goals.
What you will learn:
- Why it’s important to “start early and be patient”
- How the month you were born in can have a huge impact on what you achieve
- How geography and your cultural background heavily influence what you can achieve
- Building more equity to level the playing fields can create more opportunity for others to succeed
The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less
By Barry Schwartz
Memorable quote: “Learning to choose is hard. Learning to choose well is harder. And learning to choose well in a world of unlimited possibilities is harder still, perhaps too hard.”
What it’s about: This book explains why too much of a good thing has proven detrimental to our psychological and emotional well-being. Leveraging current research in the social sciences, he makes the counterintuitive case that eliminating choices can greatly reduce the stress, anxiety, and the busyness in our lives.
What you will learn:
- Why the more options we have means we’re more likely to make mistakes
- Why more options can equal less satisfaction from decisions
- How the overwhelming amount of choices contributes to the unhappiness of modern society
- The difference between a “maximer” and “satisficer”
- A maximer: someone who seeks and accepts the best. Choices can feel more demanding and less fulfilling
- A satisficer: someone who can settle for a choice that’s “good enough”. Choices can feel less demanding and more fulfilling
Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones
By James Clear
Memorable quote: “All big things come from small beginnings. The seed of every habit is a single, tiny decision. But as that decision is repeated, a habit sprouts and grows stronger. Roots entrench themselves and branches grow. The task of breaking a bad habit is like uprooting a powerful oak within us. And the task of building a good habit is like cultivating a delicate flower one day at a time.”
What it’s about: You’d be surprised by how much our brain’s physical anatomy plays a role in forming both good and bad habits. This book will give you a comprehensive look into the habit formation process and explain how you can develop good systems to support good habits. A series of good decisions enable good habits, resulting in the success of your goals.
What you will learn:
- How small daily decisions compounded over the long term can turn into good or bad habits
- To pay attention and be mindful of the daily decisions you make, even the smallest of decisions
- How to overcome a lack of motivation and willpower
- How to design the environment you work and live in to make success easier
- Tools, strategies, and systems to transform your habits
How To Lie With Statistics
By Darrel Huff
Memorable quote: “The secret language of statistics, so appealing in a fact-minded culture, is employed to sensationalize, inflate, confuse, and oversimplify.”
What it’s about: We are constantly being fed facts and opinions usually supported with “statistics” to make them easier to comprehend and more credible. When making important decisions, people typically rely on facts, data, statistics, and other quantifiable information. This book will teach you to go beyond the presented statistics and encourages to always seek the source of the statistics to make the best decisions.
What you will learn:
- Why it’s important to be skeptical of presented statistics when making important decisions
- How to ask the right questions to ensure presented statistics are accurate, relevant, and objective
- How statistical analysis can be skewed by politicians, journalists, advertisers, etc.
- How the information we all consume on a daily basis may have been manipulated, either intentionally or unintentionally, to give us false impressions
Smart Choices: A Practical Guide To Making Better Decisions
By John Hammond, Ralph Keeney, and Howard Raiffa
Memorable quote: “The way you state your problem frames your decision. It determines the alternatives you consider and the way you evaluate them. Posing the right problem drives everything else.”- John S Hammond
What it’s about: Three leading experts from Harvard, MIT, and the University of Southern California teach you how to approach all types of decisions with a simple and efficient set of skills. This book offers a straightforward and easy to follow user guide to help improve the way you make personal, family, and business decisions to help you achieve your goals.
What you will learn:
- How to assess your options more effectively and clearly
- The process of how to make a good decision: specifying objectives, identifying alternatives, clarifying uncertainties, making tradeoffs, and understanding your risk tolerance
- Different traps we get caught in when making decisions: The sunk cost trap and the confirming-evidence trap
- How to seek out proactive decision-making opportunities instead of waiting for them to turn into problems
Stop Overthinking: 23 Techniques to Relieve Stress, Stop Negative Spirals, Declutter Your Mind, and Focus on the Present
By Nick Trenton
Memorable quote: “More alarming than this, overthinking can completely warp your perception of events in time, shaping your personality in ways that mean you are more risk averse, more negatively focused and less resilient. When you’re constantly tuned into Stress FM you are not actually consciously aware and available in the present moment to experience life as it is. You miss out on countless potential feelings of joy, gratitude, connection and creativity because of your relentless focus on what could go wrong, or what has gone wrong.”
What it’s about: It’s incredibly challenging to make good decisions when you are constantly worried, feeling anxious, and stressed. This book will teach you various techniques and approaches to improve your mental health which can in turn, help you make better decisions that you need to make in everyday life.
What you will learn:
- Proven techniques to help you rewire your brain, control your thoughts, and change your mental habits
- How to end counterproductive thought patterns
- How to declutter your brain and focus more, putting you in a better mental state to make better decisions
Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
By Dan Ariely
Memorable quote: “we usually think of ourselves as sitting the driver’s seat, with ultimate control over the decisions we made and the direction our life takes; but, alas, this perception has more to do with our desires-with how we want to view ourselves-than with reality”
What it’s about: This book dives deep into the hidden forces we encounter everyday that shape our decisions. It challenges the notion that humans are rational and logical and are rather irrational and more emotional. These characteristics however are not entirely our faults though. They’re systematic and predictable making us predictably irrational!
What you will learn:
- Why giving up on your long-terms goals for immediate gratification is procrastination
- Why people would rather work for a cause than money
- That humans have a natural tendency to focus on what we might lose rather than gain
- ”To make informed decisions we need to somehow experience and understand the emotional state we will be in at the other side of the experience. Learning how to bridge this gap is essential to making some of the important decisions of our lives.”
Don’t Overthink It: Make Easier Decisions, Stop Second Guessing, and Bring More Joy to Your Life
By Anne Bogel
Memorable quote: “When faced with an unexpected moment of decision, it’s easy to freeze. But to get to the other side where the good stuff is, you have to enter into the messy middle of uncertainty and decision. The joy is at the end, and the only way out is through.”
What it’s about: We’re faced with questions everyday ranging from small – what do I want to eat for dinner? – To large – What do I want to do in my life? This book will teach a process for making decisions and choices that you’ll be more comfortable with. More importantly it will explain how to use an appropriate amount of energy that will allow you to focus on all the other important stuff that matters in life.
What you will learn:
- How overthinking consumes a substantial amount of mental energy to make decisions
- How to lay a solid foundation that will help you overthink less
- How to overcome negative thought patterns as they arise and putting practices in place to reduce it in the future
- How to expect good things from less than good situations
The Decision Maker’s Playbook: How To Make Data Meaningful, Meanings Actionable, and Actions Reality
By Simon Mueller and Julia Dhar
Memorable quote: Use “mental models” to make smart decisions in an increasingly complex world that is drowning in data.
What it’s about: This playbook will teach you how to streamline your decision-making process. Through lots of visuals and illustrations, it will help you to look at data and see patterns, identify relationships, and view the world through multiple lenses. If you are in a leadership position or an entrepreneur, this book is definitely for you!
What you will learn:
- A mental model to approach tough decisions
- How to better describe and frame problems so that you make the right decisions
- How to be aware of your blind spots
- How to apply systems thinking
Did I miss a favorite book on decision making? Share it in the comments below!
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