Where This Comes From

I do not naturally make good decisions.

The art of decision-making was so interesting to me precisely because I wasn’t good at it. I wanted to understand what was happening in my head that caused me to make the same boneheaded choices over and over again, and I tried everything. I read up on human behavior, studied cognitive biases, and downloaded seemingly every habit tracker app on the App Store. Annoyingly, everything I read about decision-making talked about how to deal with things that were happening outside my head. Nothing I saw explained how my mind worked to my satisfaction.

I wanted to understand the principles behind how my mind worked. It was like studying a physical organ: by dissecting my own liver, I could understand how everyone else’s liver worked as well. Of course, everyone has their unique experiences and viewpoints, but surely the underlying mechanism powering their decisions was the same. That’s what prompted my own journey of discovery into decision-making. I read books on mental models, got a Masters degree in Decision-Making, and spent years studying spirituality - specifically the Bhagavad Gita - looking to understand the nature of the mind.

Inspired by all this study, this framework and the offerings that come with it is the result. Modern decision science tells us that everything stems from our identity, and a self-conception as an instrument is the core of the spiritual texts that I’ve studied. Everything else is an extension of that conception, and the result is a framework that describes how to make good decisions - in nearly every situation.