The Most Powerful Decision Making Razors
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The Most Powerful Decision Making Razors
A razor is a rule of thumb that simplifies decision making.
The term comes from philosophy. A principle that let you quickly cut away unlikely explanations or unnecessary steps was called a razor.
Razors aren’t perfect. They’re shortcuts. But used well, they can be the highest-leverage tools you carry through life. In an age of infinite information, razors can help you stop overthinking and start moving.
Here are the most powerful razors I’ve found...
The Newspaper Test
When making a decision, ask yourself whether you’d be comfortable with the decision being published on the front page of your local newspaper.
Would you be happy to have your neighbors, family, friends, and children read about the decision you made?
If not, don’t make it.
The Duck Test
“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” - Maya Angelou
If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck.
You can determine a lot about a person by observing their habitual actions.
Trust actions over stated intentions.
The Feynman Razor
If you can’t explain it to a 5-year-old, you don’t really understand it.
Complexity and jargon are often used to mask a lack of deep understanding.
If someone uses a lot of either to explain something to you, they probably don’t understand it.
The Pygmalion Razor
When choosing who to spend time with, default to people who have high expectations for you.
The Pygmalion Effect is a behavioral phenomenon that says we rise to the level of expectations that others have for us.
So, if you surround yourself with people who believe you are capable of more, who encourage you to think bigger, you will rise to the level of those expectations.
It will be uncomfortable. That discomfort is the cost of entry for growth.
The Boredom Razor
“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” ― Blaise Pascal
If you feel stuck on a hard problem, step away and make yourself bored.
Go for a walk without your phone. Drive in silence. Take a shower.
Your most creative breakthroughs come from periods of intense boredom.
The modern world has trained us out of boredom. The person who can sit alone with their thoughts has a permanent edge over the one who can’t.
The Luck Razor
When choosing between two paths, always choose the path that has the larger luck surface area.
Most of what we call “luck” is the macro result of thousands of micro actions. Your daily habits put you in a position where “luck” is more likely to strike.
It’s hard to get lucky watching TV at home. It’s easy to get lucky when you’re creating motion, meeting people, engaging, and learning.
Sahil Note: Luck has been a personal obsession of mine for over a decade. So much so that it’s the topic of my second book with Penguin Random House. Still a ways off, but I’ll have a lot more to say on this one.
Occam’s Razor
When weighing alternative explanations, the one with the fewest necessary assumptions is usually the right one.
Put simply, the simplest explanation is often the best one.
If you have to believe a complex, intertwined series of assumptions in order to reach one specific conclusion, always ask whether there’s a simple alternative that fits.
Simple is beautiful.
The 80-10 Test
Make decisions that both your 80-year-old and 10-year-old self would be proud of.
Your 80-year-old self would have you prioritize the long-term compounding of the actions you take today. Your 10-year-old self would remind you to have a little bit of fun along the way.
The recipe for a productive, joy-filled life.
The Braggers Razor
“The loudest one in the room is the weakest one in the room.” - Denzel Washington, American Gangster
Successful people rarely feel the need to brag about their success.
If someone regularly brags about their income, wealth, or success, it’s fair to assume the reality is a small fraction of what they claim.
Conversely, if someone consistently underplays their success, it’s fair to assume the reality is a multiple of what they claim.
The Thrive Rule
Investor Josh Kushner once wrote, “The goal of life is to be excited to go to work and excited to go home.”
Deceptively simple, but cuts through almost every career and life decision.
Most people optimize one side at the expense of the other. Optimize for both. Refuse the false tradeoff.
The Optimist Razor
Spend more time around optimists.
Pessimists see the closed doors. Optimists see the open doors. And probably kick down a few closed doors along the way.
Pessimists sound smart, optimists get rich.
The Smart Friends Razor
“What the smartest people do on the weekend is what everyone else will do during the week in ten years.” - Chris Dixon
If your smartest friends are all interested in something, it’s worth paying attention to.
If that something seems crazy or weird, it’s worth paying a lot of attention to.
Sahil Note: My personal rule is that when three smart friends bring something up independently, I make a small investment in the area. Just enough to make me pay attention. The asymmetric upside of being early is worth the small cost of being wrong.
The Opinion Razor
“I never allow myself to hold an opinion on anything that I don’t know the other side’s argument better than they do.” - Charlie Munger
Learn to treat opinions as earned, not owed.
It’s perfectly reasonable to have no opinion on something that you haven’t done the work to understand.
Normalize “I don’t know enough to have a view” as a sign of strength, not weakness.
The Regret Minimization Test
“I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, ‘Now I’m looking back on my life. I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have.’” - Jeff Bezos
Your goal is to minimize the number of regrets you have in life.
When faced with a difficult decision, project yourself into the future, look back on the decision, and ask yourself which path minimizes the odds of regret.
Choose accordingly.
Hanlon’s Razor
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
In assessing someone’s actions, do not assume negative intent if there’s a viable alternative explanation, such as different beliefs, lack of intelligence, incompetence, or ignorance.
Applies to politics, relationships, and general online discourse...
Most people aren’t out to get you. They just aren’t thinking about you at all.
The Room Razor
If you have a choice between entering two rooms, choose the one where you’re more likely to be the dumbest person in the room.
Once you’re in the room, talk less and listen more.
Bad for your ego. Extraordinary for your growth.
Hitchens’ Razor
Anything asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
The burden of proof is always on the person making the claim. You don’t have to disprove something that lacks evidentiary substance to begin with.
Closely related to Sagan’s Standard (extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence) and Newton’s Flaming Laser Sword (if something can’t be settled by reasonable experiment or observation, it’s not worth debating).
The New Opportunity Razor
When assessing a new opportunity, ask yourself two questions:
Do I like the winning version of this thing?
Am I willing to do the losing version of this thing for a long time?
The first question asks whether you actually want the view from the summit. The second question asks whether you’re willing to embrace the mud in order to get there.
The best opportunities for your life pass this test. You’ll love the summit and the mud.
The Tonight Test
If you’re invited to something weeks or months in the future, ask yourself whether you’d want to do it tonight.
Humans are notoriously bad at predicting their future bandwidth. We say yes assuming we’ll have more time later. Then later arrives and we kick ourselves.
If you wouldn’t want to do it tonight, you won’t want to do it in a month.
The Time Test
Time is either invested or spent.
Invested time is put toward things that create value in the future. Experiences. Health. Careers. Relationships. Learning. Mindfulness.
Spent time is put toward things that don’t.
Always seek to maximize your ratio of invested to spent time.
The Bloom Rule
Build a life where you’re energized in the morning and exhausted at night.
Energized in the morning means you’re excited about the things you get to work on and the people you get to work on them with.
Exhausted at night means you gave your all to those things and people.
Your best life is built in that collision.
Those are the most powerful razors I’ve found.
None of them will make a decision for you. But used appropriately, they cut through the noise, so you can stop overthinking and start moving.
And ultimately, that’s the key to this whole game we call life.
This is the energy audit nobody teaches you to run. Most people think exhausted at night is the goal. It is not. Exhausted at night with nothing left on the table — that is the goal. Big difference.