Look for the Right Information, Not More of It, to Make Better Decisions
You probably think that the more information you have, the better your decisions will be. It is not always so. In many cases, adding additional information can make your decisions worse if it is incorrect information.
As author Malcolm Gladwell explains in his book Instant: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking , additional information doesn’t always help. He uses the example of doctors trying to predict heart attacks. Paying attention to the smaller health factors that don’t actually predict heart attacks takes away from the things that really matter:
However, Goldman’s algorithm indicates that the role of these other factors is so small in determining what is happening to the person right now that an accurate diagnosis can be made without them … that additional information is more than useless. It is harmful. This is confusing. What confuses doctors when they try to predict heart attacks is that they take too much information into account.
To improve these predictions, doctors would be better off focusing on several risk factors that accurately predicted heart attacks. Likewise, we can make better decisions by spending more time honing the specific nature of our problem and filtering out the rest of the information, instead of trying to analyze everything. For example, instead of trying to figure out if you are unhappy enough to quit your job, ask yourself what exactly you are unhappy with. What are some of the things that stress you every day, and are these things specific to your job, or is there some other way you can relieve this stress? The more you can improve the quality of the question you are asking, the more you can focus on just the information you need to answer it.
How to Make Good Decisions: 4 Secrets Backed by Research | Bark on the wrong tree