In this engaging discussion, Dr. Adrian Camilleri, a behavioral scientist and consumer psychologist, delves into the profound impact of life's significant decisions. He shares insights from his research, revealing how choices like marriage and career paths are influenced by age and emotional states. Dr. Camilleri highlights the common regrets people face, especially in relationships, and the importance of aligning decisions with personal values. Listeners learn practical strategies to improve decision-making and increase life satisfaction, regardless of their current stage in life.
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insights INSIGHT
Defining Big Life Decisions
Big life decisions are infrequent, impactful choices with uncertain outcomes.
They involve significant thought, resource investment, and often challenge personal values.
insights INSIGHT
Common Big Decisions
Common big decisions include starting a new job, getting married, and pursuing a degree.
These vary with age; younger people focus on education, while older people mention divorce or retirement.
insights INSIGHT
Most Important Decisions
Ending a life (often abortion) ranks highest in importance, followed by marriage, having children, and pursuing religion.
Marriage and having children combine high importance with high frequency.
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In 'Farsighted', Steven Johnson delves into the process of making significant, long-term decisions. He uses a case-study approach, drawing examples from diverse fields such as the 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden's compound, urban planning decisions in New York City, and literary depictions in novels like George Eliot's 'Middlemarch'. Johnson emphasizes the importance of deliberative thinking, mapping variables, predicting outcomes, and using techniques like scenario planning and ensemble simulations to make informed decisions. The book highlights the need for a future-oriented approach and the ability to consider multiple options creatively, avoiding cognitive biases and intuitive errors[3][5][4].
The top five regrets of the dying
Bronnie Ware
In this book, Bronnie Ware shares her experiences from working in palliative care, where she identified the five most common regrets of the dying. These regrets include: 'I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me,' 'I wish I hadn’t worked so hard,' 'I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings,' 'I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends,' and 'I wish that I had let myself be happier.' The book provides a heartfelt and inspiring account of how these regrets can be addressed while there is still time, promoting a life of greater compassion, honesty, and happiness.
How to Decide
Annie Duke
How many of your life’s ten biggest decisions have you already made?
My guest today, behavioral scientist Dr. Adrian Camilleri, would often ask this question to friends and family, and found that it generated a lot of interesting conversation. It also generated a lot of his own thoughts, which made him want to dive more deeply into it and empirically study it and other related questions as well.
The result was the Biggest Life Decisions Project, which we'll be talking about on the show today. Adrian first explains the criteria that define a big life decision, the most common ones people make, and which of these decisions people rank as being the most important. We then talk about the numbers and types of big life decisions people typically make in each decade of their lives, and how these decisions tend to be front-loaded in your twenties, but you'll still have a surprising number to make in your later years, too. Adrian shares which decisions people tend to look back on positively and are correlated with higher life satisfaction, and which tend to lead to poor outcomes and regret. We also get into the way people can both underestimate and overestimate the importance of some decisions, before ending with what Adrian has learned by working on this project about how to make good life decisions.
The Art of Manliness 
