Читать книгу Eyes Wide Open: How to Make Smart Decisions in a Confusing World - Noreena Hertz - Страница 8

It’s actually very surprising how little we think about the quality of our decision-making and how we could improve it. How absent decision-making classes are from educational curricula.

How little we think about how it is we think.

Ask most people why they came to a certain decision, and watch them stumble. How we come to our own assessments, how we arrive at our predictions and choices, are things we seldom scrutinise.

For the sake of our health, our wealth and our future security, we must take it upon ourselves to challenge the way we make our decisions. It’s a matter of self-empowerment.

If we do not want to be victims of a future that others dictate to us, we need to get better at making choices with our eyes wide open, our brains switched on.

This means getting better at collecting, filtering and processing information, getting smarter at establishing who to trust and whose recommendations to take on board, getting more adept at analysing different options and weighing up divergent opinions. It also demands that we forge a clearer sense of how it is we come to make decisions – that we understand how our emotions, feelings, moods and memories affect our choices. And that we better know and understand our environment, so that we can master its particular challenges as well.

More specifically, we need to come to terms with three powerful ways in which the environment we now live in can inhibit our ability to think smartly and choose wisely.