This book could be boiled down into a single sentence: don’t make important decisions without considering different scenarios. The book assumes the reader is overconfident and gives a variety of incredibly basic tips for thinking through your options and considering the possibility that your rosy predictions might be wrong. It’s very focused on business and based almost entirely on TED-Talk like anecdotes. They really should have spent a bit of time interrogating whether the problem they describe applies to everyone or actually a very narrow slice of the population. Unless you are an overconfident CEO or investor who has suddenly turned to business self-help books for insight, you can skip this one.

What did i learn?
Avoid the narrow frame
Try the 10/10/10 method
Ooch to get real data
Avoid confirmation bias
Set tripwires

It was interesting listening to different stories but it wasn't very cohesive.

Prioritize, assess risk, have a bias to action and test things out. What advice would you give a friend in this situation? Find someone else who has already solved the problems. Prepare for the worst. Tripwires to reconsider decisions. Find other credible people with experience to judge. Will it matter in 10 years? Think and not or.

"I know one thing: that I know nothing."
- Socrates

For the past few years I've had a fascinating and fun journey working my way through a good collection of titles about how thinking works; more specifically, about how thinking doesn't work the way we think it works. That we are constantly lying to, misleading, and deluding ourselves. That our knowledge, perceptions, beliefs, memories, and actions aren't nearly as rational and reasonable as we like to think. That many of our decisions, both the little, daily ones and the big, life-changing ones aren't as sound and carefully reasoned as we believe. Titles on my shelves I'd include in this category:

- Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions, by Dan Ariely
- Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior, by Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman
- You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself, by David McRaney
- Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, by Daniel Pink
- True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society, by Farhad Manjoo
- Practical Wisdom: The Right Way To Do the Right Thing, by Barry Schwartz and Kenneth Sharpe
- Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, by Joshua Foer
- The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement, by David Brooks
- Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler
- Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman*

While there have been times the reading has left me feeling cynical and dispirited--that there is no point trying to communicate or connect with others since their assumptions and biases will confound my efforts anyway--for the most part it has been a helpful, healthy process of improving my self-awareness and interpersonal/emotional intelligence. They've made me a better listener, less sure of my own strident opinions in discussions and more likely to assume a generous "AND" stance instead of a combative "EITHER-OR" one.

Something they all have in common, for the most part, is that they spend the bulk of their time sharing the findings of recent research and studies in order to dispel our common-sense assumptions, and only after that leave a bit of space for talking about what to do with the new information. Decisive, on the other hand, starts with the new perspectives, explains them a little, then spends the bulk of its time sharing ways we can make better decisions in light of that information. It's less theoretical and idea-based, much more practical and applied.

And here's where I regret "reading" this book as an audio, because now that I've finished it I want to go back and revisit many parts to study them and consolidate my learning. Unfortunately, there is a long waiting list for our copies of the print book, so I won't be doing that in time to include specific thoughts in this review. In brief, the authors describe a process to follow when making decisions that will help counteract many of the tendencies that steer us wrong. It's not necessarily a step-by-step formula since each decision is unique and every context requires something different, but it provides guidance and a series of checks and balances to make sure we are properly considering the issue from a variety of helpful facets.

They abbreviate the process WRAP, which breaks down--with subcategories--as:

Widen Your Options
- Avoid a narrow frame
- Multitrack
- Find someone who's solved your problems
Reality-Test Your Assumptions
- Consider the opposite
- Zoom out, zoom in
- Ooch
Attain Distance Before Deciding
- Overcome short-term emotion
- Honor your core priorities
Prepare to Be Wrong
- Bookend the Future
- Set a Tripwire

Each point requires the explanations from the book to understand the authors' perspective (especially "ooch"; definition 2 here is vaguely in line with their meaning)--particularly since so much of it is about overcoming commonly accepted truths and operational habits that we unconsciously accept as acceptable--but I think it will be a very helpful process to get in the habit of following, with guidance from the material once it's in my hands.

If I have one complaint about the book, it's that the Heaths spend a little too much time describing the fine details of the real-world examples they use to illustrate all of their points and not enough dwelling in the world of ideas that I love so much. I would have been happier had they tipped the balance of information to case studies and exemplification in the other direction. But, then, this is a book for practitioners.

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*Okay, I haven't finished the last one yet; I had both it and Decisive checked out and was considering which to make my next listen, and fairly randomly went with Decisive. I immediately regretted it when, in the introduction, the Heaths mentioned Thinking, Fast and Slow and Predictably Irrational as the two most important titles to read for background information on the studies and theories they worked from in writing this book. I'm now a few discs into it.

Another great book from the Heath brothers. I feel that their signature style - lots of anecdotes, concrete how-to tips, and summaries - is maturing. There's less verbatim repetition in this book than their previous ones, and it's still full of practical tips that you can use in any circumstances where you're faced with a decision. All around, I really enjoyed it.

Another great Heath brother's book giving you memorable case studies and actionable items to take on business and personal dilemmas. This is one that you highlight, refer back to, quote, and use as often as necessary.