Life’s Ultimate Skill: The Art of Making Wise Choices

While we tend to think that we use our rational sense and logic to make our choices, most often we are mistaken. Check out my short 3 minute video for the rest of the story, as Paul Harvey would say.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZSeB6MtxSc?rel=0&w=640&h=360]

Would love to hear your comments and how you are beginning to notice who or what is making your choices.

Peace and be well,

Krishna

Up Next: Black Friday: Who/What's Driving You?

Discussion

Joe Stafura November 26, 2012

It is interesting to see decision making described as an art, my own humble view is that decisions are more than an art form, they are deeper in our genes than even art. We make decisions not just logically, we make them with large biases which we incorporate into our mental models (ego).

We can’t change the way we make decisions, we can change our mental models so that our desires might be achieved from our decisions,but that is hard work and takes a lot of time. We are working at The Affective Computing Company to make that work a little easier.

There are thousands of self help books written every year,and hundreds of thousand more than have been written in the past, interesting since all of the answers are within each of us, but we want to override these instinctive callings and run off to look at German sport cars to validate our projected image, even as we invalidate ourselves.

Reply
1. Krishna Pendyala November 26, 2012
  
  First, thank you Joe for taking the time and sharing your perspective. I appreciate your use of mental models and their role in shaping our choices. I also agree that making choices is something we can be hard wired to a large extent. The question becomes, “How much can our free will override our conditioned responses?” Also my choice 🙂 to use the word “art” was to distinguish it from the notion of the “science” of decision-making.
  
  I have enjoyed many of self-help books and the seminars, but they don’t give you easy and memorable methods to recall and use while you are in-the-moment of choice. This was my motivation to come up with simple and friendly metaphors of the PIG, the APE and the Monkey Mind to remind us of our Greed, Fear and Ego and make us more aware in the moment.
  
  Thank you again for your input.
  
  Reply