The way to grow your career is simple: get better at making good decisions. (View Highlight)
Pretty non-controversial, right? Making better decisions = greater chance of success in whatever you’re trying to do. (View Highlight)
What does it take to make better decisions? This skill is judgement.
Judgement is the ability to transmute information into actions that achieve the desired outcome.
So, if your goal is growth, try to see the predominant skill you are focused on as honing your judgement. (View Highlight)
Judgement = quality of decision model + richness of data + clarity of mind (View Highlight)
Whenever any of us has a strong feeling about something, it will be based on a framework or algorithm we have in our brains. I call this the “decision model.” Our decision model typically lives in the subconscious, but if we are particularly aware, we manage to pull parts of it into our consciousness to be described or analyzed. (View Highlight)
Having a high quality decision model is awesome, but alas it isn’t sufficient. You also need to have enough relevant data to feed into the model. (View Highlight)
So even if one’s decision model is incredibly well-honed, the amount of known context matters tremendously.
Most engineers will make better hiring decisions after seeing a candidate in action for 3 months (internship) versus 3 hours (interview). Most PMs will make better prioritization decisions if they look at the past 6 months of customer requests rather than just last week’s requests. Most designers will design a better user experience after taking to 100 customers versus 10 customers. (View Highlight)
It is impossible to make use of an excellent decision model or a ton of rich data if you are not in the right mental state.
Fear, stress, anger, sadness, jealousy — these all cloud our ability to make use of our gifts to the greatest degree. (View Highlight)
Mental clarity is just as important to judgement as any of the other components. If you find yourself struggling to see clearly, you should doubt the quality of your judgement and turn your attention instead to regaining some of that lost clarity. (View Highlight)
