I was considering some key factors around success today, and I came to the conclusion that making decisions is at the center of successful effort. When you can make decisions quickly, you can get to more decisions and be more effective. That is the first metric of success. The number of decisions that you have the capacity to make. That has a lot to do with the ability to be successful.
The second metric is quite simply the percentage of those decisions that you get right, or decisions that lead to a positive outcome. Do you make generally good decisions? Do you make more good decisions than you do bad ones? That is the second key to success, if my theory holds true.
So look at this as a simple formula. Can you increase the number of decisions that you have the capacity to make and at the same time improve the efficacy of those decisions? It would do you no good to increase the volume of decisions only to have your good/bad decision ratio drop.
I do not know what I am going to do about this decision calculus, but it makes for interesting tracking. Can I track the number of decisions that I make in a day? Track their success ratio?
Hmm…
Guy Reams
