Want to make the best decisions to reach your goals? These slides from this videotaped workshop (video here: http://bit.ly/1LJ1zM4) combine academic research and stories from people’s everyday lives with exercises to help you gain easy-to-use strategies on how to use rational thinking to assess reality and get what you want. Please express your thoughts on the slide through leaving comments, clicking like, and sharing it with others. The presentation was brought to you by Intentional Insights, a nonprofit that empowers people to reach their goals using science-based strategies to help build an altruistic and flourishing world (www.intentionalinsights.org). Sign up for our newsletter here: http://intentionalinsights.org/newsletter

1. Intentional Decision Making
Making Decisions to Reach Your Goals
Agnes Vishnevkin, MBA

2. DECISIONS
How do we make them?
What tools can we use
to do better?

3. MAKING DECISIONS
• Past
• What happened?
• How did you think and feel about it?
• Future
• What do you want?
• Experiment with different futures
• Present
• Make decisions to move toward Future

4. MAKING DECISIONS
What is a good decision?
• Depends on how decision was made
• Use probability to make better
decision

5. HOW DOES OUR MIND WORK?
SYSTEM 1
AUTOPILOT
SYSTEM 2
INTENTIONAL

6. HOW DOES OUR MIND WORK?
SYSTEM 1
AUTOPILOT
Subconscious
Automatic
Fast
Intuitive
Emotional
SYSTEM 2
INTENTIONAL
Conscious
Mindful
Slow
Reasoning
Logical

7. HOW DOES OUR MIND WORK?
SYSTEM 1
AUTOPILOT
Automatic thoughts
& feelings
Subconscious
beliefs &
assumptions
Habits
SYSTEM 2
INTENTIONAL
Choosing to pay
attention
Our sense of Self

8. HOW DOES OUR MIND WORK?
SYSTEM 1
AUTOPILOT
Elephant
SYSTEM 2
INTENTIONAL
Elephant Rider

9. HOW DOES OUR MIND WORK?
SYSTEM 1
AUTOPILOT
Uses little energy
Runs all the time
SYSTEM 2
INTENTIONAL
Uses a lot of energy
Runs in low-effort
mode

10. HOW DOES OUR MIND WORK?
SYSTEM 2 IS ACTIVATED WHEN…
System 1 runs into difficulty
Learning new information
Awareness of potential for error

11. HOW DOES OUR MIND WORK?
SYSTEM 1
AUTOPILOT
Usually makes good
decisions
Errors are often
predictable:
• emotional issues
• assessing
probabilities
SYSTEM 2
INTENTIONAL
Can prevent System 1
errors
Needs to be activated
first
Requires intentional
focus

12. PREDICTABLE ERRORS
Wishful thinking.
Planning Fallacy
We intuitively assume that everything will go
perfectly according to plan.
We often don’t plan for extra time and
resources to be prepared for possibility of
unforeseen events.

13. PREDICTABLE ERRORS
Throwing good money after bad.
Sunk Cost Fallacy
If we invested a lot into getting something, we
tend to be reluctant to give it up.

14. PREDICTABLE ERRORS
Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we
may die.
Hyperbolic Discounting
We tend to prefer smaller payoffs now over
larger payoffs later.

15. STRATEGIES
Focus on Your Long-Term Goals
Reframe Your Perspective
• Ask Why? Ask Why Not?
• Outside perspective
• Be self-aware

16. STRATEGIES
Future Scenario method
• Think of what “might” happen in the future
• How likely or unlikely are these
possibilities?
• Focus on undesirable outcomes
• What might cause them?
• How can you prepare?

17. RESOURCES
Center for Applied Rationality
www.cfar.org
Columbus Rationality Facebook group
http://ow.ly/vfBdO
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
www.hpmor.com
Less Wrong
www.lesswrong.com