Second-Level Thinking: How to Make Big Decisions You Will Never Regret
Look past short-term results and consider long-term impacts
Successful or better decision-making requires thoughtful deliberation and attention to detail. Many ignore don’t have time for the details — they make shallow decisions and live to regret the consequences of their choices.
You can learn to make better decisions without regret. You can be less wrong more often. You can’t have a 100 percent success rate, but you can improve your chances of making fewer errors significantly.
Many people are okay with first-level thinking — they prefer quick wins and think less about long-term consequences. They make simplistic and shallow decisions without thinking about the future. They look for quick solutions to a long-term problem. You can do better than that, especially if you want to live a life with fewer regrets.
First-level thinkers look for immediate results but pay for the long-term effects. “…first-order consequences often have opposite desirabilities from second-order consequences, resulting in big mistakes in decision making,” writes Ray Dalio says in his book Principles: Life and Work.
Second-level thinking is profound, deep and thoughtful. It’s not rushed.
