How To Make Better Decisions (with way less uncertainty) - Joe Hudson - #1171

I wanted to start with decision-making, because that line about the life you want sitting beyond a few hard calls feels right. If somebody learns to decide well, how much does that shape their life?

It’s everything. In a company, you’ve got relationships and decisions; money and intellectual property came from somebody deciding something. Life is no different: marriage, work, habits, conflict. Your life is the accumulated result of unconscious choices and decisions you sit with.

Can decisiveness be developed? Who gets stuck most badly?

You can develop it, though I’d call it recognition. Perfectionists, people criticized as kids, people whose worth depends on being correct, and people frightened of consequences can spend six months analyzing whether to marry somebody. Understand why it feels loaded, and more of life becomes easier choices.

So indecision is emotional, not a shortage of information?

For ordinary consequential decisions, fully emotional. Logic is usually predicting which option gives us love, meaning, value, safety—or avoids rejection and humiliation. If I can’t tolerate looking foolish, I won’t challenge my boss. The option disappears before I evaluate it.

That makes rejection almost mechanical: if one sale takes fifty doors, two sales means ninety-eight rejections. The target becomes getting turned down enough.

Exactly. My barber was an incredible painter who never approached galleries. I offered him two grand for fifty no’s in sixty days. He got accepted twice, and now art pays his bills. Attempts can count as winning, but the deeper work is becoming okay with the feeling.

Fear shrinks the brain into either-or thinking and makes one decision feel like the last one. But decisions are a portfolio. For reversible calls, move; for irreversible ones, take more care. In marriage, my wife and I have sometimes grieved the relationship as if it were over. Once I’ve felt that loss, I stop preserving her by abandoning myself, and we can meet honestly again.

So fear threatens an identity—the successful person, the smart student, the approved-of person. What replaces that panic?

Principles. I want a small set that solves most problems over a long run, not guarantees every outcome. In business: find the part we understand least and build that first. If the unknown piece of a car is emissions, don’t finish the car before discovering it won’t fit.

Personally, everything is an iteration. Run an experiment, learn, adjust. One piece of cake doesn’t destroy a diet; you’re back on the next experiment. At work, people should try several experiments each quarter. Pace matters more than getting every move right.

A failed hypothesis still tells you something—like GPS rerouting instead of judging you for missing a turn.

Yeah. Accurate feedback, less emotional drama. Another principle is connection: does this create real connection with myself and others? Principles give me possible answers without asking fear to run the meeting.

That sounds like engineering courage: making yourself readier for difficult things.

My question is simpler: can I respect how I made this call, since I can’t control its result? When a principle points somewhere I don’t want to go, I do it if I can’t find a better principle. There’s an internal reward for being who I intend to be.

That feels relevant to audience capture. Creators start making what they imagine viewers want and lose their taste. Criticism can make people louder and inflammatory, or bland, caveated, and tiny.

It isn’t just an internet problem. People get shaped by a boss, partner, or room. You can listen and adapt without deserting your mission. Review the past year: what rules did you actually live by, are you proud of them, and are they working?

You can’t build a flowchart that avoids feeling. My daughter panicked over college essays because her straight-A identity was under pressure. I told her to stop satisfying an imagined authority and write from herself. She got angry, then generated ideas and drafts. Sometimes the blocked emotion is the whole lock.

It still sounds like courage: ‘Take me as I am or don’t.’ Fear can look massive until you step in and find it’s shallow.

In the moment, it feels like honesty, not heroism. Compromising yourself feels worse than rejection while telling the truth. Repeated truthful choices create a life around who you are, not who you perform as.

For habits, slow an automatic choice down. Before coffee, cigarettes, scrolling—whatever it is—get present: what feeling am I trying to escape or reach? Old coping patterns become emotional bureaucracy: bad wake-up, scrolling, caffeine, anxiety, then more management to feel normal.

Growing up with emotional abandonment, I either pushed people away—fuck you, I don’t need you—or got needy. Both recreated what I feared. Learning to stay with that feeling weakened the patterns. Their abandoning me hurt less than abandoning myself.

What about massive calls—leaving a relationship, moving countries, changing careers?

The identity issue is the same. If I move and have no friends, what would that mean about me? How could I still respect myself? Transformation can crack open limits you mistook for identity. That’s often where growth is.

A bad decision isn’t simply an outcome you dislike. Getting the cigarette, job, money, or person may still fail you over a decade. The clearest warning sign is self-compromise: not liking who you are being. Resentment is evidence too; if I keep agreeing to what I don’t want, I resent you because I abandoned my boundary.

And asking for input isn’t automatically self-abandonment. A wise friend can see what I can’t.

Please listen to people. The distinction is gathering perspective versus handing them responsibility for your life. If I need your permission to feel okay, I’m giving away power. Be highly convinced and highly open: conviction gets me acting; openness lets me be wrong without an identity crisis.

So look where I’m resentful, where I ignored that something felt wrong, and where I keep seeking reassurance. That gives me the muscle back.

Yeah. Learn to hold more emotion so your options stay available, then choose principles that let you act proudly. Decisiveness becomes less dramatic: make the move, learn, make the next move. The freedom is on the other side of facing the thing.