Making Decisions Easy/ Making Easy Decisions
I’ve been thinking that it would be nice to have some shorter posts on this blog. Just some clips or interesting thoughts/pieces from my daily intake — not as a way to share links with other people (I know barely anyone is reading this) but as a way to record what I find interesting over time. I might even post interesting things without… wait for it… comment… gasp.
Here is a bit of a George Packer review of Bush’s new memoir, Decision Points, that I thought was really interesting and gave me a much better understanding how different personalities/people with different worldviews make decisions:
Bush once told an elementary-school class in Crawford, Texas, “Is it hard to make decisions as president? Not really. If you know what you believe, decisions come pretty easy. If you’re one of these types of people that are always trying to figure out which way the wind is blowing, decision making can be difficult. But I find that I know who I am. I know what I believe in.” For Bush, making decisions is an identity question: Who am I? The answer turns Presidential decisions into foregone conclusions: I am someone who believes in the dignity of life, I am the protector of the American people, I am a loyal boss, I am a good man who cares about other people, I am the calcium in the backbone. This sense of conviction made Bush a better candidate than the two Democrats he was fortunate to have as opponents in his Presidential campaigns. But real decisions, which demand the weighing of compelling contrary arguments and often present a choice between bad options, were psychologically intolerable to the Decider. They confused the identity question.
