Pragma #1 — How to Tackle Big Decisions

“Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.” — Peter Drucker

According to James Clear, there are three types of decisions: hats, haircuts, and tattoos.

• Hat decisions: when you try a hat, you can leave it on or you can take it off immediately. No biggie, no costs.

• Haircut decisions: when you get a haircut, there’s no way to undo it on the spot. You have to wait for your hair to grow back.

• Tattoo decisions: when you get a tattoo, it’s really hard — and painful — to get rid of it. No matter how much you love your spouse, don’t get a tattoo of their name.

On this first pragma, we will deal with tattoo decisions. Having children, marrying someone, quitting your job, moving countries… I’m going to introduce an algorithm that will help you choose right: the Weighted Average Decision Matrix (WADM).

The Theory: Weighted Average Decision Matrix

We owe this bombastic name to MJ DeMarco, entrepreneur and author of The Millionaire Fastlane. The book is better than its title, and this is where I took this concept from.

In tattoo decisions the stakes are high. There are many factors to take into account, and choosing the wrong option can have costly consequences. The Weighted Average Decision Matrix is an algorithm that helps you choose the right option on big decisions, taking into account all the factors at play.

The Practice

Suppose you’re considering having children. Your two options are: having children (a), not having children (b). Now let’s look at the factors involved in this conundrum:

• Life satisfaction: how happy will you be with each option?

• Sleep quality: how much sleep you’ll get with each option?

• Money: how much money you’ll need for each scenario?

• Freedom: how free will you be on each case?

• Free time: how will each option affect your free time?

• Your mom’s expectations: does she want a grandchild or couldn’t be bothered?

Note that these are arbitrary factors that I’ve chosen for this example. You can choose as many as you want. After you’ve listed all the factors involved, we create our matrix — or what normal people call ‘table’.

1. In the top row, you write the following: factors, having children, not having children.

   

2. In the factors column, you write all your factors and assign a weight to them. In this case, we have 6 factors, so we number them from 1 to 6, where 1 is the least important and 6 the most important.

   

3. Next, we rank each factor for each option from 1 to 10, where 10 is amazing and 1 is awful.

   

   As you can tell, I love children

4. After that, we multiply each factor score times its weight, for each option:

   

5. Last, we sum the weighted scores in parenthesis for each option and we compare them. The higher the score, the better the option. For this example, the final table looks like this:

   

The second option, not having children, works best for me — not so much for my mom though. You can apply this method to any other tricky, big decision.

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Must-reads this week

• How to write the perfect CV with former Amazon VP Ethan Evans, by

  Giacomo Falcone
  : if you’re on the job hunt, check this out.

• Write future letters, by

  Arman Khodadoost
  : write a letter to your future self, or better yet: write a letter to your future loved one. It helps you reflect on what you want in life, and makes for a great gift.

• Eight Deeply Ingrained Concepts, by

  James Gurney
  : good decisions come from clear thinking. Acknowledging these 8 false beliefs helps remove the noise from our minds.