Wednesday, February 16, 2005

How to make hard decisions easy

There are easy choices and there are hard choices. If ever you have to decide between two options, and one option is clearly better than the other, then the choice is easy. You should go with the option that is clearly better.

A hard choice, then, is a choice in which it isn't clear which option is better. The only reason it isn't clear that one option is better than the other is because they both appear to be equally good (or bad). If they are so close to being equal that you can't tell which is better, then for all practical purposes, one option is as good as the other. If one option is as good as the other, then it doesn't matter which one you choose. If it doesn't matter which one you choose, then you might as well flip a coin.

That's it. For easy choices, you should choose the better option. For hard choices, you should flip a coin. Flipping a coin is easy enough, isn't it? This advice should solve all your decision-making problems. :-)

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