Albert Camus said: “Life is a sum of all your choices.” Given that, should we not strive to make the best choices we can?

The decision-making edition of the Re:Think series, hosted by the folks behind the Farnam Street blog, presented a wide range of approaches on how to disrupt and improve your decision-making process. Here are a few of the major takeaways.

• Diversify your community. Beware of monoculture! As a business leader, you have the power to curate the community that you interact with every day. There’s much to be learned outside your industry, demography, and geography, so go out and spend time with people outside your bubble. ant to demonstrate a yoga pose for stretching out the tight muscle I was complaining about.
• Beware of cognitive and confirmation biases. Humans are wired to make poorly-considered decisions in myriad ways. When we’re sure of the rightness of our decisions, we tend to actively avoid disconfirming evidence. Everyone has biases, the important thing is that you recognize and overcome them.
• Keep a decision journal. A key element to iterative improvement is being honest about how something was done the first time around. Decision journals are a way of keeping one honest and reflective about their decision-making processes. When faced with an important decision, record your context and reasoning. Ideally this should be done in your own handwriting to avoid subconsciously questioning whether it was really what you thought at the time. Looking back at your journals is a powerful way to avoid hindsight bias.
• Do pre-mortems. Fight confirmation bias and overconfidence by doing pre-mortems. A pre-mortem has participants imagine a future where they’ve failed to achieve their desired outcomes and asks. Pre-mortems can tease out potential problems long before they arise and allow a change of course.

Recommended Reading

Want to learn more about how to refine your decision-making process? Check out the following books:

• Decisive by Chip and Dan Heath. Decisive, which was my own preparatory reading for the conference, covers many of the key topics. The Heath brothers build up a systematic framework to fight common, unhelpful patterns in decision making. Excellent content and a great read.
• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. The Nobel Prize winning pioneer in behavioral economics breaks down the sometimes contradictory and sometimes complementary ways that the two distinct systems in our brains work. By acknowledging our flaws in judgement, maybe we can work to overcome them.
• Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger by Peter Kaufman. Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s right hand man and wellspring of insight, was referenced repeatedly throughout the conference. Indeed, Farnam Street’s philosophy comes almost straight from Munger and is something that can resonate with all of us: “I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest, sometimes not even the most diligent, but they are learning machines. They go to bed every night a little wiser than they were when they got up and boy does that help, particularly when you have a long run ahead of you.”

Main image from Flickr user somemixedstuff.

A version of this post originally appeared on the Substantial blog.