The Infinite Game of Making Decisions
If decision-making were a game, what would be the best way to play?
Artwork: ‘Diminish and Ascend’ by David McCracken
“Champions behave like champions before they’re champions . . . There is no guarantee, no ultimate formula for success. It all comes down intelligently and relentlessly seeking solutions that will increase your chance of prevailing. When you do that, the score will take care of itself.”
~ Bill Walsh
Previous in series:
Decide Like a Pro [my five-step process for bulletproof decisions]
Nothing is written in stone. You can design the perfect process and still fall flat on your face if you don’t execute. Success on one side of the coin requires awareness of the other.
I try to view myself as a player in a decision-making game. By treating decision-making as a game, each decision becomes an opportunity to play—a chance to put my skills to the test. I play games for a living, so why not live life as a game too?
There are two inconvenient truths about decision-making:
Good outcomes are not always the result of good decisions.
Good decisions do not guarantee good outcomes.
Every outcome is an inseparable blend of luck and skill. Our default mode is to credit positive outcomes to our skill and dismiss negative outcomes to luck. We have no way of knowing why something happened (it’s complicated!) so we find a way to take all the credit and avoid all the blame.
In psychology, this is known as the fundamental attribution error. We prefer the illusion of control of our own outcomes—the outcomes we’re proud of, anyway. This illusion is a warm comforting blanket that helps us sleep at night.
I often see people jump through more hoops to justify a past decision than they did to make the decision! When things go well, they pat themselves on the back and move on. When things don’t go so well, they rest easy knowing they couldn’t have done any better: It could not have been any other way. This attitude is a self-serving trap.
As Paul Graham advised, keep your identity small. Over-identify with your decisions and you will ensure that you forever remain “unlucky.” Do you want to feel good about how you played the game or do you want to play to win? Is protecting your fragile ego a higher priority than realizing your full potential?
Remember: When making a decision, keep your Self out of it.
No matter how hard you try, many decisions will not turn out as planned. You are not your decision—nor are you the outcome—so stop judging yourself. No outcome is a reflection on you as a person.
When you reflect on a past decision, the goal is not to assess the quality of the outcome. You are assessing the quality of your process. If I went to bed blackout drunk and woke up with an extra zero in my online poker account, I wouldn’t start incorporating tequila into my pre-session routine.
Be curious. Have a sense of play. Pretend a friend made your decision and asked you for advice on improvement. This will help you to view your decisions more objectively as if from a third-party perspective.
Assume every decision contains a lesson and that every decision you make will come up again. Why pay tuition for the same lesson multiple times?
You must treat every single decision as a valuable opportunity to improve your decision-making process.
Read that again. It’s that simple. Every decision becomes a compound exercise. And over time, you strengthen your decision-making muscles.
Given what you knew (and could find out) at the time of the decision, how clearly were you thinking and seeing? Made a mistake? Overlooked an important detail? Realized that you had no idea what you were trying to accomplish in the first place?
Excellent. You found a blind spot, a bug in your mental programming. This is not a setback, but a cause for celebration.
The best decision-makers are constantly searching for ways they are wrong. All knowledge has a half-life. I assume that half of the things I currently believe to be true are actually false—I just don’t yet know which half! The infinite game is to enjoy the process of excavating false beliefs as you asymptotically approach truth.
After five years as an executive performance coach, I have realized that life’s key to success is to commit to continuous improvement. The only thing standing between you and the most unreasonable goal you can think of is becoming the person capable of achieving that goal.
Want to become a world-class decision-maker? Treat decision-making like any other game. Practice makes perfect.
Every decision is a jumping-off point to future decisions. As you progress to higher levels of the infinite game, you face more interesting challenges. The stakes become higher to match your compounding abilities.
We are all navigating our ships through deep water. If you turn your ship five degrees, you won't notice the new direction much at first, but hundreds of decisions later you'll arrive at a new shore.
Treat your decisions like an infinite game. In the infinite game, there are no failures, only unexpected outcomes along the way.
When improvement is playful, improvement is inevitable.