Decisions without Suffering

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Decisions without Suffering
Decisions without Suffering

The pain-free, meta-rational approach to decision-making.

The pain-free, meta-rational approach to decision-making.

Alternative titles for this book:

Decisions for the Indecisive: towards a more decisive, less regretful you

Felt Decisions: beyond “what does your gut say?”

Why decision-making hurts, and what to do about it

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Many books will teach you to make better decisions.

This one will teach you to be decisive.

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What does it mean to be decisive?

We all know an indecisive person. They take

undue time . . . hemming and hawing for weeks on an end.

undue stress . . . worried and incongruous the entire time through.

undue confusion . . . with no clear answer; as soon as they give one, they regret.

To be decisive, then, is to take decisions

quickly . . . in the amount of time appropriate.

easily . . . in a joyous and painless way, even if it is a tough decision.

definitively . . . to feel firm in one’s convictions and settled in one’s decision.

This is the portrait of a decisive person.

The difference isn’t in intelligence or experience.

It’s in the subtle assumptions we make about what decision-making even is.

Whet your appetite with:

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`Why we suffer`⁠
⁠

Why it’s painful for you pick colleges, leave jobs, or pick out a set of earrings.

In short: confused stances.

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`Stances`⁠
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Less confused relationships with decision-making.

Enlightenment for your decisions.

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`Motivation`⁠
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Why bother improving?

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`The 12 Magic Questions`⁠
. . .

. . . to feel out any decision.

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`Felt Decisions Theory`⁠
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The “correct” way to think about decision-making, nebulosity, and your mind

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`Appendices`⁠
⁠

Making decisions in groups, in decision logs, and more.

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👉 Start here:
`Why we suffer`⁠

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Who am I?

I’m a researcher at Stanford studying AI and humans.

I’ve sucked at decision-making for as long as I can remember.

I remember standing there, spending hours deciding between a red pencil box and a slightly bigger blue one. What the actual fuck. This was no way to life.

Picking colleges. Choosing an internship. These things should have been 🎉 joyous, 💫 happy moments . Instead, they were turned into months of arduous, pain-filled struggle.

I dragged my friends & family into it. I’d regret it, change my mind.

For me to become even remotely functional, I had to 🪓 deconstruct & build from scratch 🏗 the way I thought about decisions.

I want to share that with you.

I was prompted to write this after the 10th or 11th time a friend or client came to me for help with a major life decision. Quitting their job. Moving countries. Somehow, after talking to therapists and life coaches and family, it was only after me that they felt the conviction to take the call. Stay/quit. They felt good about it. Not sure if they were totally right, but they felt okay making the call.

I hope the meta-lesson is: those who’ve struggled the most have often had to question society’s assumptions the most to even become functional. They might have the most to offer sometimes. What you struggled with, deconstructed, and overcame is valuable—and worth sharing.

Are you selling snake oil? This conviction seems fake/dangerous to me.

I’m not selling anything. This is free.

One might think that my methods are more about 🙈 tricking yourself into conviction rather than acknowledging uncertainty. Magical hypnosis genie methods for fake conviction.

This is not so. See my page on

Fake conviction?⁠

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What’s with the compass?

I think of making decisions as navigating life. Journeying as a ship. 🌊🌊🚢

I don’t like the “fork in the road” metaphor at all.

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🤮. It induces anxiety, makes me think of 🪓 closing off paths, and makes it seem I can ⏳ sit there all day deciding.

Sea-faring, on the other hand?

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It makes it clear life will not wait—I can make the decision or not. Always moving, not sitting at a fork, dynamic. I can’t wait endless because I am in motion and I will hit the rocks if I do.

It makes it clear this is navigation, inherently tricky, clouded by the fog of the future. Decisions have consequences, but you can navigate back around. It makes it almost even a bit fun, and romantic.

A fork is a tribulation to pass. Navigating a ship isn’t even just about the destination! The cruise itself is the point. The ports you visit, the sights you see. It’s not so much “getting to point B” or “picking the right fork” as experience-after-experience as you navigate through life rather than towards a place.

There are other reasons I like the ship metaphor.

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Surfing life⁠

is an apt metaphor for partial control in life.

Who are you bringing along on your ship? You might be steering a team, or a crew.

You can have a big cruise liner (stable job, many homes). You can’t navigate as easily, starting and stopping takes a long time (can’t just move to a new country), but you can host a lot of people abroad (spouse? family? friends?), give them a place to live, and have security.

Or you can have a nimble kayak. Be travelling the world, a digital nomad or backpacker, though you can only fit 1 or 2. A storm can wipe you out, but you can also more easily avoid it. Probably harder to raise a family.

When you zoom out to the macro of decision-making, it’s these questions—your general life nimbleness vs largesse, the constantly evolving exploration—that are

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Message me on

Twitter⁠

email⁠

. For the month of September, you can

schedule a call⁠

with me.

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Decisions without SufferingDecisions without Suffering

Alternative titles for this book:

What does it mean to be decisive?

Whet your appetite with:

⁠Why we suffer⁠⁠

⁠Stances⁠⁠

⁠Motivation⁠⁠

⁠The 12 Magic Questions⁠ . . .

⁠Felt Decisions Theory⁠⁠

⁠Appendices⁠⁠

👉 Start here: Why we suffer⁠