STREET DOGS: Reversible or irreversible?
No need to waste time on easy decisions
Many of the most successful people adopt simple, versatile decision-making heuristics to remove the need for deliberation in particular situations. One heuristic might be defaulting to saying no, as Steve Jobs did. Or saying no to any decision that requires a calculator or computer, as Warren Buffett supposedly does. Jeff Bezos asks himself: is this a reversible or irreversible decision? His decision to found Amazon, for example, was made knowing that if it failed, he could return to his prior job. As he explained in a shareholders letter: "Some decisions are consequential and irreversible or nearly irreversible – one-way doors – and these decisions must be made methodically, carefully, slowly, with great deliberation and consultation. If you walk through and don’t like what you see on the other side, you can’t get back to where you were before. We can call these Type 1 decisions. "But most decisions aren’t like that – they are changeable, reversible – they’re two-way doors. If you’...
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