The Anatomy of a Good Decision

Make the hardest decisions of your life like a surgeon

Want to make life’s hardest decisions—about jobs, relationships, marriages, divorces, hiring, firing, moving cities, and everything else—all without losing your sanity?

Read on.

For the last three months, I’ve been writing about what makes for bad decisions. Today, let’s talk about how to make good ones.

In retrospect, I think my fascination with decision-making started in med school. A bit of background first:

Medical training in the US starts with university, followed by medical school, followed by 3 to 5 years of residency. You get to apply to college and med school, interview, and then, you get to decide which of the offers you’re going to choose. Residency is dealt with slightly differently.

You also apply. You also interview. But then, instead of programs offering slots to med students for them to accept, you both—you and the residency programs—send “rank lists” to a centralized computer.

You rank all the programs you interviewed at, from most preferred to least, and programs, in turn, rank all the students they interviewed in the same way.

The computer matches students to programs, and, with few exceptions, wherever it places you, you go.

Which means the rank list is supremely important. How should a med student rank? Should they truly pick their most…