OK, I’m ready to state the obvious.  If the Brothers Heath, Chip and Dan, were to write a new book about how to correctly fill you car with gasoline, I would be the first to buy it.  There is really good insight, and most of it is “well, duh” insight that I simply had not known how to think about, on practically every page in each of their books.

This coming Friday, I will present my synopsis of Decisive:  How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work.  (Come join us.  Click here to register).  I just presented my synopsis of their earlier book, Made to Stick, for the umpteenth time, this time to the Sergeants Class at the Dallas Police Department.  And I’ve referred to Switch at least twice this month alone.  And, by the way, their subtitles are always as good as their titles…

Come on, guys!  Produce more books, faster please…

Well, here’s the “well duh” insight from Decisive that I will share in this blog post.  They tell a story about Shane Frederick, a graduate student who could not decide between a Pioneer Stereo at $1,000 or a Sony Stereo at $700.00.  He spent an hour in the store agonizing over his decision.  Then, a salesman walked up, and said this:

“Well, think of it this way – would you rather have the Pioneer or the Sony and $300 worth of albums?”  (Note to young readers – ask your parents what record albums were).

Shane Frederick changed his academic pursuits to study decision sciences.  One reason:  “It intrigued Frederick that it simply hadn’t occurred to him to think that way.” 

The term for this kind of thinking is “opportunity cost.”  If I spend this amount, then I give up the opportunity to spend the same amount in this different way.  “Which way would be better?”

And, the bigger problem is that when we focus on only one way – when we don’t see the other ways – we can’t even spot the other ways.  From the book:

Focusing is great for analyzing alternatives but terrible for spotting them….  When we focus we sacrifice peripheral vision.  And there’s no natural corrective for this; life won’t interrupt our focus to draw our attention to all of our options. 

And, you really do need your peripheral vision in making big, important decisions.  This has real world, big-time consequences.  The Heath brothers tell of the disastrous mistake Quaker made in buying Snapple.  And they put it this way:

Which makes us wonder whether Quaker would have benefited from a slight tweak to its choices:
(A)  Buy Snapple.
(B)  Don’t buy Snapple.  Keep the $1.8 billion for other purchases.

So, here’s our challenge.  It’s good to focus.  Except when it’s not good to focus.  And peripheral vision can be invaluable.  So…  ask…  “what else could I decide?”, before you decide much of anything, and certainly before you decide anything of significant consequence.

And, this is only one of four really helpful decision-making “frames” in the book.  This is a helpful, useful, valuable book.