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Good Decision-Making Depends on an ‘Archer’s Mindset’
A professional poker player’s advice for optimizing outcomes
Most decisions are ultimately a guess. You can’t be certain that anything you do will lead to a specific outcome, and you can’t know the exact likelihood of any outcome at all. Part of becoming a better decision-maker is shifting your mindset about guessing.
I may be a professional poker player, but I approach decision-making the way an archer thinks about a target.
Archery isn’t all or nothing, where you get points only for hitting the bull’s-eye and everything else is a miss. An archer gets points for hitting the target at all. Decision-making is similar. The value of guessing isn’t in whether the guess is “right” or “wrong.”
You’ll likely miss the bull’s-eye but, like the archer, you will still score points for landing in the vicinity. The important thing is to take aim. That means assessing what you do and don’t know about the possible outcomes of your decision, the rough probability for each of those potential results, and your preferred outcome within those possibilities.
The alternative is a decision-making process that’s less like archery, and more like pin the tail on the donkey. Instead of taking aim, you’re willingly blindfolding yourself to the target. And if you’re blindfolded, spinning around, and stabbing a pointy object, you’re about as likely to shiv the person cutting the cake as you are to land on the donkey’s butt.
How to take aim at a decision
Implicit in any decision is the belief that the option you choose has the highest probability of working out better for you than the options you don’t choose. Therefore, even if you aren’t explicitly thinking about the set of possibilities, your preferences, and the probabilities, you are still making these estimates.
Once you acknowledge that you’re basically making a guess no matter what, you’re emboldened to factor…
