The world's most valuable skill:

Making decisions.

But universities charge you thousands of dollars and never teach you this.

Instead, here is the decision framework that is easy to learn, costs nothing and will save you hundreds of hours of deliberation:

You might know this framework as "One-way/Two-way door decisions"

Many have already written about it, citing an old Jeff Bezos shareholder letter from 1997

In a nutshell, it's this:

One-way Decisions

• Difficult or expensive to reverse

• Should be made carefully or methodically

• Often times strategic in nature

Two-way Decisions

• Easy to reverse

• Can be made more quickly

• Help us understand our environment better

The common corollary is that...

Most people think decisions are irreversible

But actually most decisions are reversible

That's a nice lil' heuristic when your back is against the wall, but it's not very practical

Let's peek behind the veil a bit..

I'd like to take you further back to 1981, where Jeff might have learned about this.

16 years before Jeff's letter, a 1981 paper "Reversible and Irreversible Decisions: Preference for Consonant Information as a Function of Attractiveness of Decision Alternatives" suggested:

The person's preference for differing or similar information changes.

It changes when (a) judgments can be revised and (b) there is a dissonance.

When the decision could be changed, conformable information had less attraction than alternatives.

When decisions couldn't be changed, people preferred identical information over different information of equal attractiveness.

To reduce dissonance, respondents choose between attractive options.

In other words,

When people think a decision is reversible, they diverge.
When they think it's irreversible, they prefer to reduce ambiguity and converge.

Here's Bezos's genius: he imbued this thinking in the culture at the highest level.

If people follow and view all decisions as reversible, they'll look for divergent options.

The optionality this creates is akin to a complex organism's ability to survive.

Subtle, but powerful.

So here's the takeaway formula for you:

Default to "this decision is reversible"
This triggers: "I need different options"

Another way to look at it:

"Nice, I've got many different options!"
"This decision is reversible, I can pick either and it'll be fine."

I'll leave you with 2 more quotes to bring it back home

I featured both in my newsletter: nurijanian.substack.com

1/ Annie Duke ("How To Decide", "Thinking In Bets") wrote something very similar:

"When a decision is hard, that means it’s easy."

2/ Richard Meadows ("Optionality: How to Survive and Thrive in a Volatile World"):

"The only way to ‘solve’ an intractable problem is to reject its assumptions."

That's a wrap!

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1. Follow me @nurijanian for more of these

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How To Decide Faster & Better: The Wisdom Beyond The Amazon Decision Framework

The world's most valuable skill: Making decisions. But universities charge you thousands

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