Get Smart!: How to Think and Act Like the Most Successful and Highest-Paid People in Every Field
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- Consider the Consequences
- Analyze Your Way of Thinking
| Two Thinking Styles The two thinking styles contrasted are fast thinking versus slow thinking. With fast thinking, we process information quickly, intuitively, automatically, instinctively, like making decisions while driving a car in busy traffic. We react and respond with little thought or consideration. For most of our activities, such as conversations, meetings, navigating daily life, or grocery shopping, fast thinking is both appropriate and necessary. The consequences are not important, such as whether you order a hamburger or a fish patty for lunch. It doesn’t really matter in the great scheme of things. For many other areas of our lives, slow thinking is more necessary, and even essential, if we are to make the right long-term decisions that yield the consequences we desire. Here was Kahneman’s insight that was central to making his book a bestseller, and deservedly so. He said that the biggest mistake that most people make is that they use fast thinking in making long-term, vital decisions, where slow thinking is much more appropriate. Consider the Consequences For example, decisions about the courses you take at college, what career path you embark upon, the person you marry, and how you earn, save, and invest your money all require slow thinking. The more important a decision can be to you in the long term, the more important it is that you slowdown, calla timeout, and carefully consider both the facts and your options. In starting and building a business, slow thinking is absolutely essential in certain areas. Which product or service you specialize in, which customer segment you aim at, which methods of production, sales, marketing, and distribution you select, and your cost and pricing decisions are all vital to the successor failure of the enterprise. Analyze Your Way of Thinking From now on, ask yourself on a regular basis, Does this situation require fast or slow thinking?” Buy time for yourself whenever possible. Put as long a gap as possible between the stimulus and the response, between the thought and the decision. Practice the “Seventy-Two-Hour Rule Give yourself or buy yourself seventy-two hours, or three days, to consider a major decision before you make it. Lord Acton wrote, If it is not necessary to decide, it is necessary not to decide.” The longer you take to make an important decision, the better that decision will be in almost every case. Continually use the words Let me think about it and get back to you.” If someone tries to pressure you into making a decision on an important issue, you can say, If you insist on an answer immediately, the answer is NO. But if you let me think about it fora while, the answer might be different.” |