If you're wrestling with a tough decision, NPR's Life Kit piece offers a contrarian approach: spend less time thinking about it.
The article profiles decision coach Nell Wulfhart, who has guided over 600 people through difficult choices. She says most clients find clarity within just one hour of working together. After a decade of coaching everyone from CEOs to artists, she's concluded that "most people take way too long to make decisions. They get mired down in the analysis."
Wulfhart urges clients to overcome their instinct to deliberate endlessly over major life choices. She says fear of regret often paralyzes us, when in fact, "many more people regret taking too long to make a decision than making a decision too quickly."
"The decision-making business is really just the regret-minimization business," she says, saying we should accept that some regret is inevitable and recognize that "people who feel less regret are people who are able to say, 'I made the best decision I could with the information I had at the time.'"
The article outlines two practical exercises Wulfhart gives every client. First, list your personal values — "not moral or corporate values, but the things that make your life good on a daily basis" — and rank them by importance. Second, sketch your ideal life at one, five, and ten-year intervals, then see which option creates a clearer path toward that vision.
The article also offers practical guidance on testing options rather than just thinking about them, limiting advice-seeking to 3-5 trusted people, and recognizing when we're too fixated on sunk costs while ignoring opportunity costs.
Previously:
• Make tough decisions easier with a decision matrix
• Search algorithms are editorial decisions
