How to make better decision: Construct a fact-based worldview
Why is it important to know the actual facts about the world? We’ll not be in immediate danger if we have the inaccurate point of view. But it does lead us to make a series of wrong decisions, and we eventually arrive at an undesirable destination/outcome.
For example, imagine yourself as one of the product managers in your company aiming to maximize revenue. It is obvious that you will target at high-income level audience and differentiate your product from others in the already competitive market. So, you spend a lot of money and resource on researches and marketing. Meanwhile, your colleague, Zoey, plays a different strategy. She plans to target at lower-income level audience and perfectly meet their needs. Accordingly, Zoey finds the most durable product from existing market and uses no special marketing method. Six month later, Zoey easily increases the revenue but you struggle to maintain pre-level revenue. To your surprise, customers in lower-income level actually have the spare money to spend on personal computer. And, because they have limited resource, they like to buy things from word of mouth and are loyal to the brand.
So let’s take a step back. What makes you decide to target at high-income level audience in first place? A distorted world view about people in lower-income level.
Most of our knowledge is learnt when we are in school and is outdated. As we grow up, we have to update our worldview accordingly. With a fact-based world view, we can understand the world better. We can make better decisions. We can spend our money and time wisely. Also, knowing that fact is not like stone but like clay makes us a more open-minded person accepting new ideas.
Besides the rules of thumb in the book- Factfulness to help us build a fact-based worldview, I would like to share some useful and insightful tips that enable us to see things from different perspective and analyze the situation precisely.
Tip one: Things can be both bad and better. The world is not either good or bad. We may encounter terrible things but still feel that things are getting better everyday. For instance, there are people still living below the poverty threshold but the number of them is decreasing year to year. It is bad that they have to walk in their barefoot. Isn’t it improving when less people are suffering? Absolutely yes.
Tip two: Numbers mean nothing when you don’t compare/divide them. You often see this kind of horrifying headline on newsletter: Over 1 Billion People Had No Access to Electricity in 2014. Then you are like “Oh my god! That’s a huge number. I have to do something about it.” But the truth is only 15 percent of the world population in 2014 do not have access to electricity.
Tip three: If you really want to fix the problem, find what actually causes it rather than find the person who is responsible for it. When thing does not happen as we expected, we tend to point the finger at others. Once we find the person/group to blame, we stop learning from the consequence and are not able to prevent the problem from happening again. For example, blaming the driver of a car accident will not stop future accidents. Understanding the attribute, we can fix the problem once and for all.
Constructing a fact-based worldview is not asking us to give up anything we have built. The main point is that we have to update the information from time to time.
So, start to upgrade your worldview with the solid facts as following:
．The world is getting better.
．Proportion of girls in primary school is 90 percent.
．Most people who earn more than $32/day will be non-westerners.
