How To Make Better Decisions (with way less uncertainty) - Joe Hudson
In a Nutshell
Decisions are 100% emotional problems driven by fear of feeling certain feelings—mostly threats to identity—rather than lack of information. Great decision-making requires becoming comfortable feeling all emotions and developing principles that make 80% of decisions automatic, treating everything as iterative experiments rather than right-or-wrong outcomes. Fear creates black-and-white thinking and illusory finality, while courage comes from feeling the feared emotion first, which dissolves the pattern and reveals that the actual experience is much smaller than anticipated.
These notes were generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
Life that you want is located on the other side of a few difficult decisions, and the reason you're unhappy is that you do not take it. For leaders developing multi-billion dollar companies, business boils down to two things: existing relationships in the work and decisions you make. Everything else comes down to these two things. Some head money and intellectual property exist, but those came from decisions made by individuals. Jeff Bezos stated that for his next company after Amazon, he wanted it to be the best company in the world in decision-making.
In life, whether you smoke cigarettes, build a company, marry someone, maintain a marriage, or handle arguments, all these things are decisions. Decision-making skills are extremely important for various purposes. It is important to separate choices from decisions. Choices are simply things you don't think about, such as sitting a certain way without conscious thought. Decisions are where you really spend time thinking.
Decisiveness can be trained through awareness rather than being purely an inherent trait. There are perceptions that can occur and allow for resolution. Once you truly understand what's going on behind the scenes, decision-making begins and the flow of decisive action starts from that. Understanding why it's difficult for people to make decisions makes decisions less important and choices more common, resulting in better outcomes. Daniel Kahneman's system two thinking is very deliberate and requires significant mental attention. Through training, the second system becomes the first system, making carefully considered decisions the default.
Perfectionists, people who were exposed to much criticism in childhood, people who were told that their value lies in correct action, and people who have a tendency to fear consequences are the ones who struggle most with decisions. These individuals conduct lengthy and in-depth SWOT analyses, thinking and reasoning for extended periods, sometimes still considering decisions after six months.
Decision-making is 100% an emotional problem, supported by neuroscience. The book "Descartes' Error" states that the emotional center of the brain is responsible for making decisions. People whose emotional centers have been damaged cease to be able to make any decisions, though their IQ remains the same while their lives collapse. They may spend fifteen minutes trying to determine the color of a pen or where to have lunch.
While automatic responses like jumping from a snake attack bypass the emotional center, hiring decisions or investment choices involve deciding to feel a specific feeling. Most decisions stem from wanting to feel loved, appreciated, worthy, or avoiding feeling like a failure, loser, ignored, or rejected. This represents 90% of decision-making from a neurological perspective.
The idea that you make logical decisions is utter nonsense from a neurological perspective. Logic dictates trying to figure out how you would feel if you took one decision versus another. A SWOT analysis about business direction or investments attempts to predict emotional outcomes. If guaranteed happiness from a decision, the SWOT analysis becomes unnecessary. The same applies if guaranteed meaning from a decision.
If afraid of feeling something specific, a set of solutions in decision-making will not be available. Fear of looking like a loser prevents withstanding certain risks. A person at a cafe who doesn't mind rejection will approach ten women and have options unavailable to someone afraid of rejection. Fear of a boss screaming prevents speaking up about important matters. When reaching a stage of not minding rejection or feeling stupid, decisions become very clear because they are made based on principles rather than fear of consequences.
James, a business partner at Newtonic, needed two more sales before the end of the week to avoid losing his job. His sales rate was one per fifty doors. His team leader reframed this: knocking on 100 doors would achieve the goal through 98 rejections. A barber who was afraid of rejection was offered $2,000 if he could get 50 rejections in sixty days. Unable to get 60 rejections but receiving two acceptances, he now earns his living selling his art.
The barber wasn't afraid of winning $2,000 but was afraid of feeling like a failure. Unconscious feelings drive choices like smoking cigarettes to avoid certain feelings or browsing phones to escape emotions. Every decision made was driven by fear. When afraid, the mind tends to think in black and white, becoming completely bipolar about options like accepting or refusing a job, breaking up or staying with someone. Fear prevents seeing all possibilities and restricts viewing things in black and white.
Fear creates an illusory ending where making a bad decision seems permanent. Amazon's approach is to make decisions quickly if reversible, but take time if irreversible. This illusory ending prevents seeing what lies behind decisions. Most people think about decisions as "What am I going to do about this decision?" rather than thinking about decisions as an investment portfolio where not everything needs to be perfect, only adherence to principles matters because the majority will succeed.
When someone says they need to make a decision and asks what to do, this indicates tremendous fear reacting beneath the surface. Fear stems from consequences, and experiencing those consequences emotionally leads to better decisions. In a 27-year marriage, fear of losing a spouse led to decisions that abandoned personal principles. The solution involved mourning the marriage by assuming the loss had already occurred, feeling all associated emotions until the fear disappeared.
This process mirrors ancient practices from Stoicism, samurai traditions, and Tibetan teachings on life and death. The way to overcome fear of death involves imagining and experiencing death repeatedly, watching the body decompose. For marriage decisions, the focus should extend beyond the moment of divorce to imagine subsequent experiences like being alone, not finding another partner, and potentially remarrying. This overcomes fear because difficulty making decisions usually stems from fear of emotional consequences rather than lack of knowledge about what to do.
Fear stems from identity being threatened. Things that really matter define and determine identity. Every decision made based on fear reveals exactly where principles are lacking. Having a set of principles means 80% of decisions are made according to those principles, similar to Berkshire Hathaway's investment criteria where nothing is worth investing in if it doesn't conform to their standards, resulting in holding cash instead.
A work principle involves building what you know least about first when creating something new. Building the catalytic converter before the car ensures efficiency rather than discovering problems after building the car. A personal principle states that everything is a repetition. There is no such thing as failure, only experimenting, learning, and continuing experiments. This mindset transforms every experience into learning rather than success or failure.
Neurological research identifies the habenula, a part found in all vertebrate brains that prevents feeling failure. This same mechanism prevents bears from immediately fighting again after losing mating rights and causes dieters to abandon their diet after one slip. The repetition mindset counters this by viewing everything as a series of experiments until finding what works. People who successfully lost weight at the poverty line all followed a repetitive mindset, stating they were conducting experiments until finding something that worked.
At work, specific standards require conducting three to five experiments each quarter on performing jobs differently. This demonstrates treating everything as an iterative process that allows mistakes, enables learning, reduces concern about results, and prioritizes speed and progress over perfection. Most people lose in life because they try to do the right thing rather than trying to maintain the pace of progress. Moving forward is more important than getting things done perfectly.
The experience that does not prove the hypothesis correct is not a failure because learning occurs regardless.
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The GPS mind operates like navigation systems that provide clear directions without judgment when mistakes occur. A surgeon and dog trainer applied this concept using a clicker device instead of praise or criticism. When training surgery students on knot-tying and other procedures, he clicked only when tasks were completed correctly rather than saying "good work" or "don't do that." This approach led to significant improvement in their learning rate.
The principle "everything is a repetition" functions as a GPS mind by helping achieve greater success. When facing problems, this principle guides decisions about improving decision quality and accuracy while eliminating fear. Another principle is communication, which involves building genuine connections and helping others find this connection. When reviewing business problems through the lens of communication, multiple solutions emerge that weren't previously visible.
Courage engineering involves improving readiness to face frightening situations. However, the core thinking process focuses on controlling how one wants to be involved in decision-making rather than controlling outcomes. The key question becomes whether one is proud of how a decision was made, which is controllable. Principles will succeed, and pride remains even if results don't work out. If decisions fail, the same principles can be developed further.
When facing decisions that feel unwanted, principles provide clarity about the correct action. Positive reinforcement occurs when acting according to principles, building trust in them for future decisions. The implicit reward exists regardless of outcomes, as one appears as the person they want to be. Margaret Cho's comedy show revolved around failure, but the painful aspect was giving up on herself rather than being honest and failing.
Audience capture occurs when content creators stop making what they want and start creating what they think audiences want. This involves serving "red meat" to audiences and programming behavior based on positive reinforcement from popularity metrics. Creators become disconnected from their personal taste and operate as puppets of their perceived audience. When audiences stop expressing love for work created through compromised principles, resentment develops toward them.
Ethan Strauss wrote an article titled "The Captivity of Criticism is More Dangerous Than the Captivity of the Audience" about three or four years ago. Criticism, rather than praise, proves more prevalent in inciting unrest among people. Some individuals protect themselves from potential negativity by becoming more provocative and aggressive, while others neutralize themselves by remaining neutral without taking genuine positions, always providing warnings and considering negative possibilities beforehand.
Jordan Peterson represents the perfect example of being trapped in criticism capture. The amount of criticism he faced was greater than almost anyone in history has been forced to handle, except heads of state. This criticism caused major distortion in his presentation. People with principles in their work don't necessarily stop listening or reacting, but they maintain their brand and mission without deviation. Those who live lives based on principles achieve longer-lasting success without functional burnout.
The two main components of great decision-making are becoming comfortable with all kinds of feelings and having a set of principles to live by. Rather than stopping decision-making until principles are established, one can start by examining decisions made last year to identify actual lived principles and assess whether they feel proud of them. This process may involve ugly reflection for many people.
A daughter applying to universities experienced fear about writing an important article, expressing black-and-white thinking about inability to complete it. Her father encouraged her to express anger about having to prove herself to others. Using a method for dealing with anger involving a tennis racket, she wrote three articles the next day. Many crucial decisions remain unmade simply because certain feelings need to be experienced first.
Beneath emotional content like anger, fear, sadness, and helplessness lies identity breakdown. The daughter had to give up her identity as "the smart girl" and outstanding student who could accomplish anything. Her anger represented the statement "damn you" to judgment from others. This level of behavior connects to external factors like self-confidence, self-esteem, self-worth, confidence, flexibility, courage, and boldness, but fundamentally represents being honest with oneself.
Alex stated that "Fear is one inch wide and a mile across." When facing enormous challenges, the actual experience proves much smaller than anticipated. Alex chose the non-traditional path of establishing a sports club instead of following the university success route expected as a son of a Middle Eastern father from Iran.
Alex's story demonstrates how courage transforms decision-making. Despite an Iranian cultural background with strong family expectations, he made the decision to pursue what felt authentic to him by physically removing himself from the situation. He drove across the country before calling his father to create physical distance before having the difficult conversation. This approach allowed him to step into his fear, which initially seemed vast but proved shallow once confronted. After making the first difficult decision, the momentum shifted dramatically - what felt like careful bow-hunting transformed into machine-gun momentum, with subsequent decisions becoming easier.
Courage creates compound effects over time. When making decisions aligned with your true self, you build a life that genuinely reflects who you are rather than who you're pretending to be. Short-term compromises may satisfy immediate needs but fail to create a sustainable life. Authentic decisions, even when they carry high social costs, create an organized life around your genuine identity.
Donald Trump serves as an example of someone willing to pay an extremely high price to remain consistent with who he is. Sam Harris represents another case - his positions on various issues consistently anger people on both sides of the political spectrum, including those who oppose Trump but also the "Woke" movement, or those who oppose Islam while favoring nationalized healthcare. The higher the personal cost someone pays for their positions, the less predictable their next stance becomes, indicating genuine independent thinking rather than crowd-pleasing.
Courage manifests in mundane, everyday moments rather than only dramatic situations. People who commit to honesty with themselves create lives that genuinely reflect their authentic selves without necessarily committing to provocative positions.
When facing decisions, particularly habit-based ones, slowing down the process is essential. Identity work continues throughout, but the practical skill involves slowing emotional experiences and learning to sit with uncomfortable feelings. For example, when trying to quit coffee, the approach involves examining the emotional triggers before reaching for the drink - what emotion occurs before drinking coffee, and what are you trying to escape or avoid?
Emotional patterns can persist even after the original trigger disappears. Sleep disruption from health issues created a cascade of catastrophic thinking that led to phone-scrolling as distraction. Even after sleep improved, the habit of reaching for the phone remained as an automated response to the emotional pattern, controlled by a mechanism no longer consciously felt.
Without conscious intervention, emotional patterns accumulate like sedimentary rock over time. Bureaucracy doesn't destroy itself - active intervention is required to dismantle both external bureaucracy and what can be understood as emotional bureaucracy. The phrase "We're trying to control what we cannot trust" captures the essence of both bureaucratic and emotional control mechanisms.
When experiencing difficult emotions like sadness and helplessness upon waking, the mind creates bureaucratic processes to avoid feeling these emotions. The sequence might involve phone-scrolling as distraction, then caffeine to manage resulting distress, creating layers of bureaucracy just to return to baseline normality. The goal is making unconscious choices conscious by bringing awareness to the emotional experience surrounding decisions.
The core challenge involves feeling emotions you don't want to feel and learning to embrace them. Personal experience with emotional abandonment - stemming from an alcoholic father and emotionally absent mother - led to either pushing people away or becoming overly dependent, both recreating the abandonment pattern. Learning to embrace the feeling of emotional abandonment rather than trying to escape it through either rejection or dependency reduced the frequency of abandonment and changed the experience when it occurred.
Once you can feel emotions that were too threatening to experience as a child, the governing patterns begin to dissolve. What felt impossible to experience becomes tolerable, and eventually the pattern loses its power. People in programs like "Groundbreakers" who learned to accept and welcome difficult emotional experiences saw decades-old patterns begin to fall apart.
Decisions range from mundane choices like what to wear or how to interact with a barista to major life decisions like whether to stay in a relationship, get married, leave a job, or relocate. The underlying principle remains consistent across scales - identity is always at stake, whether the decision involves social interaction or major life changes.
All decisions involve identity questions, regardless of scale. The person asking how to talk to a barista may be testing whether they have social phobia, while someone considering relocation questions their entire identity. The key insight is that we often don't recognize the chain of smaller decisions that enable larger ones - the decision to marry someone depends on the prior decision to go on a first date.
Some decisions carry obvious significance while others seem minor but prove consequential over time. The probability that a decision will be significant isn't always apparent when making it. Identity concerns often make decisions feel larger than they might objectively be - moving to a new country raises questions about who you would be without familiar social structures.
The crucial skill for major decisions involves separating your sense of self from the decision outcome. Rather than asking "How do I make the right decision?" the deeper question becomes "What is my true self?" This creates an opportunity to examine the restrictions you place on yourself. For example, moving to England without friends raises questions about whether you can maintain self-worth without social validation.
Fear of change ultimately traces back to identity concerns. The fear isn't change itself but the possibility that change will negatively affect "me." Status quo bias represents a decision to maintain current patterns rather than actively choosing change. The fear of the unknown connects to deeper identity questions about whether you will be okay without familiar structures.
Major life transitions, while destabilizing, represent the greatest potential for personal growth. These moments of transformation are when people either develop most significantly or deteriorate most dramatically, depending on whether they engage consciously with the process. The emotional intensity of major decisions signals their importance as opportunities for development rather than merely problems to solve.
Most people define a terrible decision as one where they don't get what they want. The real question is whether getting what you want actually delivers what you truly desire over the next year, month, week, or decade. Fear reduces the likelihood of getting what you want because approaching someone with fear makes them less likely to give it to you. The more fear present when making a decision, the less likely the desired outcome becomes.
A truly bad decision occurs when someone compromises their principles. There's something inside that knows when this happens—a voice that becomes more sensitive over time but can atrophy if suppressed.
To retrain this atrophied muscle, look back at the past week, month, or two months and identify what you did that you knew wasn't right. Resentment indicates you've given up on yourself. In relationships, resentment toward a partner means the person hasn't set boundaries and has abandoned themselves to please the other party or avoid anger.
Dissatisfaction serves as a great evaluation tool. Look back and ask where situations occurred where you didn't feel you were the person you wanted to be.
Every moment requiring reassurance from others represents giving up oneself. When you say "I don't know what's right" when you actually do, you're relinquishing your authority to someone else. When you say others know the answer instead of yourself, this represents self-abandonment.
There's a distinction between listening to people as a major source of wisdom versus seeking their approval. If you can't feel comfortable doing something without asking if it's acceptable, you're giving up on yourself.
Decisiveness increases significantly when confident in your identity. People with a stable sense of self are much more decisive. Making decisions is better than making the right decisions because once you make a decision, you test your hypothesis in reality. Making 100 decisions daily and implementing them beats making 10 decisions while ensuring they're correct.
What stops decision-making is feeling your identity is at risk. If identity is based on "having to be right" due to parental criticism, you'll avoid decisions. The more confident people become in themselves with value stemming from within, the more assertive they become.
"I prefer to be wrong and absolutely convinced of it, rather than right but hesitant." Being wrong allows realizing the mistake much more quickly. There's a test measuring two axes: conviction and openness. Most believe you can be either convinced or open-minded, but the graph shows you can be highly persuasive and highly open-minded simultaneously, or low in both.
People fear future regret but often become stuck and paralyzed in the present. The thing people fear often happens at the moment of trying to make the decision. Someone scared of being stuck in marriage may already be stuck while spending six months making the decision. Someone afraid of wasting time making the wrong decision is already wasting time being confused and weakly convicted for 3-6 months.
The emotional consequences people fear are often much less severe than the current suffering. There's also a chance current pain could stop, but it won't stop without taking action.
People in deep hesitation forget they're doing themselves great disservice. The implicit meaning of hesitation is that you must do it correctly, don't know what's best for yourself, and cannot solve problems or learn from mistakes. This level of self-flagellation is often unrecognized.
When addressing hesitation, the message is: "I'm really sorry because you're depressed and somehow believe you need to be perfect to be valuable, loved, and worthy of appreciation. You're not that way. If you could see yourself clearly for a moment, you'd see this decision won't define you. You deserve love regardless of the decision you make here."
Decisiveness involves not letting the public shape you, not being a prisoner of public opinion. There's a difference between being assertive and being in control of your own affairs. If you make an effort to be decisive, you'll feel more in control of your life.
Having initiative doesn't necessarily mean being decisive. These two concepts are often confused. An example of someone with initiative but not necessarily decisiveness: a brilliant actor who decides to stick to certain roles, goes to auditions, but won't invent their own role or produce work.
Initiative means this person has control—they say "I'll live the life I want" and "I want to be the person I want to be." Some people have determination but lack the initiative to be themselves. They lack the flame or tendency to impose themselves but won't compromise on their principles.
During university, before being expelled from the first university, attending a class about Hermann Hesse with a German teacher who lived through the bombing of Berlin. When under the tunnels during bombing, people shouting from above, it was always the quiet, non-proud, indecisive type who climbed up and saved them, while the person putting on a show shirked their responsibilities.
It's difficult to be highly effective and hesitant simultaneously. Even if decisiveness was necessary, it might not be enough to be effective.
George Mack is writing the reference book on high effectiveness, to be released within the next year and a half. The "Michelangelo influence" refers to two people in a relationship, friendship, or intimate partnership who see the best in each other. Just as Michelangelo saw David inside the marble and only removed what wasn't David, the best friendships and relationships involve seeing the best parts in each other and helping highlight them while removing things that don't represent you.
The essence of coaching is seeing people, seeing the wisdom they possess, seeing them in their true nature even if they cannot see that part themselves.
In a coaching relationship, the method involves understanding yourself more clearly, which enables seeing others more clearly. The way you cannot see yourself exactly is the way you won't be able to see others.
Since being in his twenties, involvement with Vedic sciences as one of the paths through which learning occurred. Began with Zen, delved into Hermann Hesse, and into Vedic sciences. Vedic sciences contain a section entirely related to health, including Ayurvedic health and practices followed for longevity.
Pancha Karma is described as a health reset involving a very specific diet and approximately six hours of daily therapies that are diverse and somewhat unusual. Three consecutive years of participation have been completed, with the most recent experience being the most intense.
A densely populated location was selected for the experience, which proved to be an amazing emotional journey comparable to experiences from years prior. The physical means were used to create this reset, with the nervous system being the primary focus of the work.
Conversation is strongly discouraged throughout the facility, creating silence everywhere. No telephones are allowed in the cafeteria, and there is no talking in the cafeteria, resulting in complete peace and quiet. The location is situated in a forest setting, creating a metaphorical "noble silence."
This environment enabled extensive meditation and genuine happiness, with the ability to observe internal chaos and madness. The mood was primarily related to the nervous system, described in their terms as a "FATA reset."
During the six-hour treatment periods, there was immense pressure accompanied by realizations about unnecessary actions and behaviors. The contrast between absolute happiness and peace versus working states was experienced, with the work causing temporary disruption followed by return to the peaceful state.
The experience included observing the doctor's facial expression during treatment, which resembled naval exercises. The perspective of being on the receiving end rather than the giving end was noted, with the recognition that freedom lies on the recipient side.
The speaker mentions having met their wife but not their daughters, with one daughter met briefly during training. A podcast was recorded with Yuna under the title "How You Look Life as a daughter of Joe Hudson" or similar, described as a very good podcast.
The speaker states they are not online at all and not interested in headlines or improvement phases.
A podcast about decision-making exists with several episodes that delve into all topics discussed, including the cycle of great decisions. A five-week course is offered that is often very intense because it dives directly into many emotions. Participants should know what they are getting into before beginning.
The course begins at the beginning of January and will be released as a kind of New Year's resolution. A waiting list provides 24-hour priority registration, and tickets usually sell out through the waiting list.
The Art of Achievement podcast is mentioned as another resource. The episode concludes with a request for YouTube channel subscriptions, noting that many people press the subscribe button but the channel still cancels subscriptions, so viewers should verify the subscribe button is active below.
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