The Anatomy of a Good Decision

Make the hardest decisions of your life with confidence

Want to make life’s hardest decisions—about jobs, relationships, marriages, divorces, hiring, firing, moving cities, and everything else—all without losing your sanity?

Read on.

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For the last three months, I’ve been writing about what makes for bad decisions. Today, let’s talk about how to make good ones.

In retrospect, I think my fascination with decision-making started in med school. A bit of background first:

Medical training in the US start with university, followed by medical school, followed by 3 to 5 years of residency. You get to apply to college and med school, interview, and then, you get to decide which of the offers you’re going to choose. Residency is dealt with slightly differently.

You also apply. You also interview. But then, instead of programs offering slots to med students for them to accept, you both—you and the residency programs—send “rank lists” to a centralized computer.

You rank all the programs you interviewed at, from most preferred to least, and programs, in turn, rank all the students they interviewed in the same way.

The computer matches students to programs, and, with few exceptions, wherever it places you, you go.

Which means the rank list is supremely important. How should a med student rank? Should they truly pick their most preferred program first, even if it’s a reach? Should they rank a safer program first so that they’re not forced to settle for programs lower down on their list if the dream program doesn’t work? How much should the training itself factor in? The city you’re in?

And so on.

Late 1999, that was me. I stared at the pro-con list I’d written on a sheet of paper, taped to my apartment wall in Dallas. The page was creased from being taken down, folded, unfolded, and retaped so many times. Two columns, perfectly balanced, listing everything I could think of about which residency programs I should rank, and where.

How did the interview feel? How much were they offering in salary? Were there benefits? Did I like my potential colleagues? Was the city walkable? Was it too cold? Too hot? What was the training like? Would they pick me on their rank list? How much did that matter?

And on

And on

And on…

And…I felt not an inch closer to clarity. Honestly, a coin-flip could have made the decision better than me that day.

Does this sound familiar at all?

I’m betting so.

It may not have been a residency decision in your case, but I’m guessing you’ve also been in that paralysis zone at least once, with at least some other decision.

You’ve hit the decision wall, where everything you’ve been taught about how to make a good decision falls flat.

And you’re stuck.

There’s a reason for this: It’s because everything you’ve been taught about making decisions is wrong.

Simple pro-con list don’t work for big decisions—and neither does asking your closest friends, going for a walk, flipping a coin, or even just trusting your gut. The problem isn’t you; the problem is that these methods are bound to fail.

And that’s because decisions—especially the big ones—are complex, intertwined, deeply emotional and deeply uncertain things. Not a single thing you’ve been taught about decisions even comes close to encompassing all of those moving parts.

They’re like using a hammer when what you need is a scalpel.

So let’s change that.

What makes a good decision?

Here’s an obvious statement: All decisions are made under uncertainty. It’s what makes them so difficult.

Big decisions don’t suck because they’re hard. Big decisions suck because our brains don’t like uncertainty. It’s literally how we’re wired. That’s why none of the usual methods you’ve been taught work.

Pro-con lists, gut checks, consensus-making, all of it: everything you’ve been taught can’t handle the complexity of uncertain decisions.

But—uncertainty is what makes a decision.

No decision is made with certainty. Not a single one. If there were no uncertainty, there would be no decision to make!

And what that means is that whatever framework we build for making life’s hardest decisions has to do three things:

1. It has to incorporate the important outcomes you—the decision-maker—are interested in.

2. It has to prioritize those outcomes according to your values

3. And it has to defang the uncertainty

And that’s what I’m doing in today’s post.

What comes next is a simple, seven-step framework I’ve developed to do all three of those things well. It comes from the principles of decision science, a field I’ve spent all my research life in.

And it’s deeply personal: I’ve used it myself to make literally hundreds of life decisions—from jobs to relationships to moving to new cities. I’ve spent years honing this, from the crude way it started back in Dallas in 1999 to the clean pathway it’s become.

And I’m so excited to share it with you because I can’t wait to hear how it transforms your own decisions (seriously, I can’t…I really want to hear from you, so leave your comments or drop me a line).

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Before we get started, though, I have two caveats for you:

First, decision-making is hard. This is a simple framework, in that it’s simple to follow. Only seven steps.

But it is not an easy framework. Our anxiety around big decisions stems from the fact that they’re big. They have consequences. So, anyone who promises you an easy solution is lying to you—or themselves—about how hard decisions are!

What that means: if you want to use this framework, be prepared to put in the work, the mental energy to do it. It’s going to take some soul-searching and it’s going to take some algebra (no, really).

If you do, though, if you put in the work, I promise it’ll give you clarity. I promise it’ll guide you in deciding what’s important to you, and in acting in line with your values.

Second, this is a distillation of the framework I teach my clients. It doesn’t encompass everything—but it comes really close! In the interest of converting an eight-week course on making the hardest decisions of your life into something digestible, I’ve had to pare it down.

That said, even the pared version is powerful. As the famous statistician George Box said, “All models are wrong. Some are useful.”

This is one of the useful ones.

Don’t take my word for it, though. Read on. And then try it for yourself.

The Anatomy of a Good Decision

The money at the front. Here’s the framework. We’ll walk through it next, step by step, using an example big life decision.

Print this out (PDF version here), save it, tape it to your wall. Let this guide you through your next big choice:

The Anatomy of a Good Decision

Step 1: Ownership check

First of all, is this decision actually yours to make? Are people involved who should actually be making this decision? If so, then stop here. You’re not ready—or empowered—to take the choice.

On the other hand, gut check: Did you just say “no” too readily? Are you avoiding a decision that should be yours?

Read on. We avoid decisions out of fear, and this framework will cut through that.

Step 2: Value dissection

If this decision is yours to take, this is where we start honing down on your values.

Pick the three most important things in your decision.

Only three.

I realize it’s a tough ask, but the fact is, our brains get overwhelmed if we try to juggle too many things in our working memory. So, this allows clearheaded thinking.

But don’t worry if you think there are, say, six important things instead of three. Pick the top three, and stash the other three aside. We’ll come back to them in the last step.

And besides, the act of narrowing your values down to three helps you focus on the things that are most important for you.

EXAMPLE: Let’s say I’m looking for a new job, and I’ve been lucky enough to get interviews with three different companies. Here’s an example of one such value dissection, where my Top Three are salary, city, and work hours:

EXAMPLE:
I'm interested in finding a new job.

The three things that are most important to me are
1. Which city I'd be living in
2. How much money I'd make, and
3. How many hours I'd work

(Side note: Do you have deal-breakers? Don’t include them in your top three. We’ll get to them in Step 4.)

One more thing you’ve got to do before you’re done with Step 2. Assign an importance weight, from 1–10, to each of Top Three. Use 10 for the most important, and 1 for the least.

For example, if I’m most interested in maximizing my salary, and as a close second, minimizing my work hours, then my ranking might look something like this:

EXAMPLE:
Ranking:

Salary = 10
Work hours = 8
City = 2

Where I live is important for sure—it’s one of my Top Three after all! But it’s less important than the other two; five times less important than my salary, in fact.

Gut check: How are you feeling? This is the most soul-search-y part of the pathway, so don’t be discouraged if this feels hard. It’s suppoed to!

Step 3: The choice set

The good thing is that Step 3 is easy. You simply list all your options.

Sometimes that list is really short—if you’re considering whether to work on your marriage or leave, that list has only two things in it: Stay or Go.

Whatever your set of choices looks like, write them all down.

In my example, I’ve gotten three job offers, so my Choice Set looks like this:

EXAMPLE:
Choice set:

Job 1
Job 2
Job 3

Step 4: The dealbreakers

Here’s where we get to incorporate the Deal Breakers. You’ve probably got some. Like, maybe you’re convinced that, no matter how high a salary is, you wouldn’t take a job if it required you to be fluent in a new language, or scuba dive three days a week.

Whatever those Deal Breakers are, this is where you handle them. Let’s say that I would never accept an 8–5 in-person job:

EXAMPLE:
Deal-breakers:

No matter how much it pays, I'd never take a job that was 8-5 in-person in an office

Now, with the clarity of your deal-breakers in front of you, immediately eliminate any option that has one:

EXAMPLE:
Deal-breakers, part 2:

Job 3 pays a ton, but it's full-time in person. It's immediately eliminated

Two NOTES:

First, if you have a hard time eliminating a job because it contains a “deal-breaker,” then you’re kind of obligated to ask yourself: is that actually a deal-breaker? Or should it, instead, be one of your Top Three, and should something else fall off the list?

Second, the reason we do deal-breakers here and not in Step 2 is because including deal-breakers in your Top Three means you lose a Top Three slot to something that’s pretty easy to eliminate. Doing it this way lets you keep the Top Three for the things you’d actually consider.

Step 5: Evaluate each option

Alright. So far, you’ve

• Listed all your options

• Determined your Top Three

• Ranked your Top Three, and

• Eliminated anythign from your Choice Set that has a deal-breaker

In Steps 5 and 6, you finally get to make the decision!

First, for Step 5, rank on a scale of 1–10 each of the surviving options in your Choice Set, across each of your Top Three.

In other words, on a scale of 1–10, how’s the salary at Job 1? How’s the salary at Job 2?

Scale of 1–10, how do you feel about the city you’d live in with each job? How do you feel about the work hours at each job?

Take your time with this one.

EXAMPLE:
Ranking:

JOB 1:
Has a bad salary, so I choose to score it = 2
OK-to-good work hours, score = 7
Love the city, score = 10

JOB 2:
GREAT salary, score = 9
Not-so-great work hours, score = 5
And it's in a bad city, score = 3

Don’t worry if you don’t get it right. You can play around with the numbers in Step 7. Get as close as you can to what your gut tells you.

And then move on to where the magic happens.

Step 6: The math is the magic

Congratulations, you’ve already built your decision model. It’s done! Now all you’ve got to do is let it run.

You can do the next step by hand, or you can do it on Excel. Either way, it’s just a little bit of arithmetic.

(By the way, if you want a ready-made Excel spreadsheet that does all the math for you, you can find it here.)

Anyway, here’s what you do for Step 6: Combine the individual Top Three scores for each Choice Set option with how important each domain is. It looks like this:

EXAMPLE:
Remember: Salary had an importance of 10. Work hours was 8. And city was 2.

JOB 1:
Salary score = 2. Imporance = 10. Total = 2x10 = 20
Work hours score = 7. Importance = 8. Total = 56
City score = 10. Importance = 2. Total = 20

JOB 2:
Salary score = 9. Importance = 10. Total = 90
Work hours score = 5. Importance = 8. Total = 40
City score = 3. Importance = 2. Total = 6

And then you add the scores together:

EXAMPLE:
The math is the magic

JOB 1: 20 + 56 + 20 = 96

JOB 2: 90 + 40 + 6 = 136

That’s it! Job 2 won!

Almost.

Step 7: Here’s where the uncertainty comes in

So far, we’ve only addressed the first two of the three hallmarks of a good decision:

1. It incorporates the important outcomes you — the decision-maker — are interested in.

2. It prioritizes those outcomes according to your values

3. It delivers clarity out of the uncertainty

We haven’t really addressed the last one. That’s what we do in Step 7.

You’ve made your rational decision. You’ve weighed everything. You’ve done the math.

Now, it’s time to try it on.

Take five full days, and live as if.

Tell yourself, “I’ve accepted the offer at Job 2.” Wear the company colors. Follow the company’s social media.

Try the shirt on, and see how it fits.

And then, come back to the framework. How do you feel?

If you feel good, then you’re done. Congratulations! Use this framework for any big decision you have.

But what if you don’t? What if the shirt doesn’t fit so well? What if you’re regretting your decision?

This is where you go back to Steps 2 and 4 and ask yourself if they truly reflect how you feel about your options, especially in light of of the last five days of living as if.

Are your ideals actually aligned? While you were trying on the shirt, did something else become more important? Or are your Top Three still the same, but has their ranking changed?

Well, make the change. Re-run the model. (If you don’t want to redo the math by hand, the Solving For Why Decision Framework does it for you).

And then see if your Top Choice changes.

It may—or, more surprisingly, it may not!

It often takes me two or three times before I’m finally comfortable that I’ve represented what’s going on in my head (and in my heart) the right way.

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To sum it all up, here’s the entire model, with all the examples included. You can download a PDF of it here.

The Anatomy of a Good Decision, with examples

Bringing It All Together

One last thought. The goal is never perfect decisions — they don’t exist. The goal is good decisions. Decisions you’ve thought through, felt through, and tried on. As Herbert Simon has noted, we’re not looking for optimal choices but ones that are good enough, given everything we know right now.

That’s exactly what this framework does. As I said, it won’t make decisions easy, but it will make them better. It’ll give you a way to acknowledge both the analytical and the emotional aspects of decision-making, while staying grounded in the literal decades of research on how humans make choices (rather than how we think we should make them).

And through it all, never forget that the best decision-makers are not those who always get it right, but those who can survive and learn when they get it wrong.

So, the next time you face a significant decision, put away the simple pro-con list. Instead, work through this systematic framework. Your future self will thank you for it.

Now go and do the thing!

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If this framework resonated with you, imagine having these tools and techniques fully integrated into your decision-making arsenal.

You can! Join hundreds of other professionals who have transformed their approach to decision-making. The next cohort starts in 2025, and spaces are limited.

If you’re ready to make consistently better decisions, set up a call with me here. Your future self will thank you for this decision.