THE CHALLENGE OF CHOICE

Health and wellness coach Fast presents a systematic look at how and why people make decisions.

“We tend to think of successful people as being somewhat lucky—and luck is always a factor in a successful outcome,” writes the author in his latest book, “however, a significant component of luck is simply the ability to make good decisions.” Humans, he points out, are bombarded by millions of bits of information every second but can only consciously process about 40 of them. According to Fast, this ratio extends to decision-making, noting that “the actual number of life-changing decisions you make may be as few as 20 out of the many millions you make throughout your lifetime.” Drawing on research from psychologists, neurologists, sociologists, and others, Fast breaks down the workings of the various heuristics that inform the process of coming to decisions for most people, and he lays out how they may be effectively manipulated to play one set of human impulses against another. In psychological terms, he writes, these warring impulses can be thought of as System 1 (the unconscious, “automatic” mind) and System 2 (the conscious, controlling mind); the tension between arises, he says, from the typical human craving for comfort via familiarity. In these energetically written pages, which include numerous stock illustrations and photos to make individual points, Fast dissects a wide variety of cognitive tendencies from self-censorship to “groupthink” to biases such as the sunk-cost fallacy. He’s excellent at clarifying these concepts, using examples from history and current events to illuminate how people hinder their own decision-making abilities. Readers are sure to see themselves in some of Fast’s examples and will likely learn a lot from them.

A fast-paced, thought-provoking behavioral blueprint.