Here's How to Avoid Being Stupid (7 rules)

Summary

Too many people focus on being smart, while not many focus on how to avoid being stupid in the first place. In this video, I discuss the 7 most common pitfalls everybody falls into when deciding so that you never fall for them again.

Transcript

Welcome to the first video of a series about how to make better decisions and in this first video we're going to learn how to avoid being stupid because instead of trying to optimize our decision making the highest leverage should be found in not making stupid decisions by the end of this video you're going to have a clear framework that you can use to judge every decision along your entrepreneurial career and avoid making unnecessary mistakes welcome back

hello everyone Leon Castillo here founder of Selfmastered if you're new to the channel please consider subscribing we release a few juicy videos every week to help entrepreneurs and professionals accelerate their careers and businesses by becoming laser focused top performance so today i want to discuss something that is very simple but has a profound effect on your life if you nail this down if you really learn if you internalize the mental model that we are going to discuss today your life will not be the same because now you'll have the knowledge that will give you the power to not make stupid choices in the future i know these are big words but bear with me this mental one is very very powerful so when looking at decision making we need to think about what is a decision in essence and if you think about it you can chart it as a system right a decision is something you do to transform something into something else an insight into an action a piece of information into a new initiative so in essence it's all about inputs and outputs and what we're trying to optimize here is the process how do we know that we are interpreting the inputs in the best possible manner to maximize the chances of having the best outputs and based of this mental model so input that would be data process that will be the actual decision making process and output the actual decision we have ways by which a decision can go wrong and only one of those ways is related to the input and the others are related to the process itself so let's get into it so the first decision making pitfall that can help you appear too stupid is related to having the wrong information is trying to take a decision based on things that are unaccurate is a surefire aware of messing up the decision right so the first mishap that you can fall into is taking a decision based on wrong information which is why the quality of the inputs will always drive the quality of the outputs second problem the second problem you may find when making a decision is that you are operating outside of your circle of confidence outside of what you already know and this can be for several reasons one is because you've never encountered this problem before so your pattern recognition skills are not tuned to this problem and therefore you are in the dark you don't really know how to approach this decision you can also be that you haven't learned from the first time right maybe it's not the first time that you are faced with this decision but you don't remember what did you choose in the past so you didn't learn and if you don't learn that you may as well do it again wrong right so that's the second thing it is super important to know exactly what you are doing to make sure that you have the necessary skills to actually take a good decisions based on the data so the second problem is operating outside of the circle of confidence operating outside of what you actually know how to do now third problem and the second one related to process is being stressed when you are stressed you are compromising your cognitive ability to judge information to value each piece of data as it should be valued maybe you're overvaluing irrelevant data and undervaluing key data points that should drive the core of the decision when you are stressed you're just more prone to mistakes there's more problems showing up in your decision making process and therefore it is easier to mess the decision up and this brings me to the four problem you may have and the third problem related to process which is being under urgency not having enough time to take a decision if you think about it for a minute every time you're rushed you're stressed somebody's pressuring you to do a decision that's probably because that decision is not the best for you so if you are short on time you tend to not value the data points upon which the decision is based as they should and you miss out on key information so again if you are under pressure try to cool it off because chances are that you will be taking the wrong decision remember napoleon said dress me slowly because i'm in a hurry meaning if you focus on doing the correct steps slowly to make sure that you're nailing the process you'll eventually get to your destination faster than if you did otherwise this is a fable of the tortoise and the hair the tortoise ends up winning because it doesn't get unfocused it's the same principle now you may have information overload right so you may have too many data points to judge too many things coming at you so you do not understand what's actually signal and what's noise so you mess up and you over value other value pieces of data that shouldn't so you end up basing your decision you end up processing the wrong information and this is a big problem in the society we live in because it is very easy to get swayed away by scores of data that in the grand scheme of things mean nothing now the two final problems that you may have when making decisions had to do with others with the kind of people that you make decisions around and groupthink we have as human the tendency to seek consensus when we are in a group and therefore if the opinion of the group isn't aligned with who we think we may sacrifice the pursuit of truth for willingness to belong to that group so belonging ends up being more important than actually truth seeking and that's when our decision-making process might be compromised when we are in the presence of people that mean to us and we want to belong to and therefore compromise the decision and finally the last one and this is very common is when you are trying to make a decision and you have an authority somebody that you look up to somebody you respect that may hold a different opinion or may have a different way of processing the information or maybe thinking in a different way than how you are thinking if this is happening then maybe your decision-making process might be compromised precisely because of this because you respect this person because you believe that opinion is valuable and you're able to compromise your own decision-making abilities because you just holding more steam the opinion of that authority than yours this is the first video of the series and remember that is way more important to not be stupid than optimizing for the correct decision and the best way to avoid being stupid is one make sure that you have the correct data two make sure that you know how to interpret that data because you've seen it before because it's inside what you know is true because you've worked within this circle of confidence before three make sure you're not stressed make sure you're not miss analyzing the information because you are not to the top of your thinking abilities four make sure that you're not rushed make sure that urgency does not play a role in your decision making make sure that you are not missing out on relevant information because you are short on time five make sure that you have up being operating on based on signal and not noise make sure that you are not falling for information overload which is one of the key defining characteristics of the century we live in and then finally if you are making decisions within a group make sure that you do not fall for groupthink make sure that your decision making process is sound and clear and not compromised by consensus and finally if you happen to be making decisions in the presence of people that matter to you that have an authority over you that you wanna that you look up to make sure that their faulty decision making process is not affecting yours if you follow this rules you create a checklist and you use it at every this key decision that you need to do i can assure you that the percentage of good decisions that you make it's going to go dramatically up so this is it for today it's the first video of this series please like subscribe comment do everything you guys know you you need to do so that we can keep growing and releasing this material to help you become the best performer in your career and of course if you want a proven decision making framework talk to us we may be able to help you see in the next video