Otherwise intelligent people can make terrible decisions. Think about decisions like these:

• Napoleon decided to invade Russia (and Hitler did it again 130 years later)
• An editor deciding to publish O.J Simpson’s If I Did It
• Chris Webber choosing the timeout he didn’t have in the 1993 Final Four
• NASA’s decision to ignore the O-ring issues on the Challenger
• President Kennedy’s famous blunder to continue the Bay of Pigs operation inherited from the previous administration (a mistake he quickly learned from)
• Margaret Thatcher deciding to get behind a “poll tax” that led to her ouster by her own party
• Juergen Schrempp, the CEO of Daimler-Benz, deciding to merge with Chrysler despite massive internal opposition and general history of big M&A deals working very poorly
• …and a hundred thousand more…

These were catastrophic decisions made by people who were, in some sense, professional decision-makers. They had impeccable credentials and judgment, and yet they made poor decisions due to poor judgment, a too-limited mental representations of the world, or just plain stupidity.

---

“The frog in the well knows nothing of the mighty ocean.”— Japanese Proverb

---

To learn how to make decisions, I found some mentors around my organization. I watched them, asked them annoying questions, and tried to learn as much as possible from them. I did an MBA. I read everything I could about making decisions. And thanks to the internet, I was no longer limited to the best teachers in my organization or university. The entire world was available. I could find the best teachers in the world, learn their tools and frameworks, and add them to my mental toolbox.

You’d be amazed at who replies when you tell them you work for an intelligence agency and you think they might be able to help you save lives.

You probably don’t know it but you already think in mental models.

A mental model is a compression of how something works. Mental models help us understand the world. For example, velocity is a mental model that teaches both speed and direction matter. Reciprocity is a mental model that shows why going positive and going first puts the world on your side. Relativity is a mental model that shows us we have blind spots and how a different perspective can reveal new information. The list goes on.

The models in your head shape how you think, approach problems, and identify the information that matters and ignore what doesn’t.

Few things will change your trajectory in life or business as much as learning to make high-quality decisions. Yet, no one teaches us how to make consistently effective decisions.

I remember standing in a windowless room at a three-letter intelligence agency. Information was flowing across the screens. Some information said zig, and some said zag. What to do wasn’t clear, and the wrong choice would end up on the front page of most newspapers and put troops in peril.

“Shane…. we need a decision.”

The problem? I was 24. No one had taught me how to make decisions, let alone choices like this. There was no one else around. I could feel my heart beating faster and faster.

I started working at an intelligence agency on August 28, 2001. Two weeks later, the world changed. If you were in the building, you did what you needed to do. No one complained. We all just wanted to do our part.

If no one would teach me how to make decisions, I’d have to teach myself.

There is no class called “practical decision-making.” Making better decisions isn’t one skill but a series of tools, behaviors, and frameworks (see decision by design).

What distinguishes consistently good decision-makers from poor ones is an ability to position yourself, understand the circumstances, and think.

Even a genius looks like an idiot when circumstances force them to make a poor decision. The converse is also true. An average person can look like a genius when they position themselves to take advantage of circumstances.

Aside from positioning, the key is learning to think through a problem using mental models. Mental models are important because they change our perspective and reduce our blind spots.

We recommend the following two proven techniques for improving your learning.

The Feynman Technique

If you want to supercharge your learning, the single most effective technique we’ve uncovered for absorbing new concepts comes from the famed Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman. The Feynman Technique ensures you understand what you learn. It includes the following four steps:

1. Choose a concept you wish to learn about.
2. Pretend you are teaching it to a child—a sixth-grader, specifically. Write your explanation down or say it out loud.
3. Identify any gaps in your understanding that might show up when you try to simplify the concept; go back to the source material to find the information you need.
4. Review and simplify your explanation again.

It works because writing out a concept in language a child would understand forces you to understand it at a deeper level. Sometimes we use jargon and complicated language to hide what we don’t understand. The Feynman Technique lays bare the true extent of our knowledge.

Similarly, asking better questions is a route to faster learning. The most mundane questions—the ones a sixth-grader might ask—can sometimes teach us the most because they require an explanation that digs into the details.

How do you know if you’ve truly learned a new concept? Feynman proposed a simple alternate test: try to rephrase it in your own language without using its actual name. For instance, describe what enables a dog to run without using the word “energy.”

Spaced repetition

Rote memorization doesn’t work. Period. The key to effective learning is spaced repetition, a technique that works with the way your brain naturally retains information, not against it.

Spaced repetition involves revising information at increasing intervals. This reflects and combats the fact that once you learn something you gradually forget it, with the forgetting happening fast at first, then leveling off. Using spaced repetition, you remind yourself of information often at first, then less often.

Memory mastery comes from repeated exposure to new material. In order to learn something, you need to retrieve it from memory again and again. Retrieval makes information stick even better than re-exposing yourself to the original material.

There are two main places we can learn from: our own experience and history, or the experience of others. Exploring the distinction between the two can show us the best ways to learn from each of them.

Learning from history

You can learn from the experiences of others by studying history and applying its lessons to the present. History tends to repeat itself, so the dilemmas and decisions you face today often have historical antecedents. Studying the past helps us know how to shape the future. History is one of our biggest sources of fundamental knowledge.

Any time you learn from the past, remember that knowledge collapses over time. Much of what you know today will one day prove false, just like much of what people knew a century, fifty years, or even a decade ago has since proved false. Facts have a half-life, one that can be especially short in fields like medicine and the social sciences.

It is a mistake to think we have reached the endpoint of human knowledge, or that anything you learn now will be true forever. When you learn from history, you draw from lessons shaped by the perspective of the person who captured what happened. Thus, historical knowledge is something to continuously update as you learn both from what happened and how you choose to look at it.

Learning from experience and reflection

In addition to reading, direct experience is the other main way we learn.

Double loop learning is a way of updating your opinions and ideas in response to new evidence and experience. When you keep repeating the same mistakes, you’re using single loop learning. It doesn’t get you far. When you reflect on experiences, collect new data, and make an active effort to seek out feedback, you’re using double loop learning.

Reflection allows you to distill experience into learning. Don’t just “do,” think about what you’re doing and what you’ve done. High performers make adjustments based on both their successes and failures.