How To Sharpen Your Decision Making Skills With This Simple Game
Every day the average human being is presented with a plethora of decisions to be made. Now, in most cases these are pretty easy decisions, like what breakfast to have in the morning, which clothes to wear, where to go for lunch and what programmes to watch before bedtime. In the world of business the decisions that need to be made are far more significantly important, and making the smart decisions can be the different between success and failure. If you look at people like Alan Sugar, Richard Branson and Bill Gates, they’ll usually be the first to tell you that they got where they by gambling and making risky decisions. They reason that each of these men got to where they are is because they are smartly decisive. Many people associate decision making with being abrupt and forceful but really it is a lot more subtle than that.
It is something you see all the time on TV game shows like Deal Or No Deal, where contestants open 22 numbered boxes to eliminate cash prizes until they are left with the last box and, hopefully, the largest sum of money. If you watch the show regularly, you will notice players attempt to formulate a process that will help them to choose their next box. No matter how much they might try and attach a process to their decision making, it will never change the outcome of what is in the box, that is pre-determined before any other decisions are made.
Ladbrokes have launched a free-to-play Deal Or No Deal High Low Game which is good for working on your decision making skills. The choosing of the boxes is taken away from you, they will be opened in a certain order, so all you need to do is predict whether the value of the next box will be higher or lower than the previous box. Sounds simple, right? Wrong. It starts off easily enough, for example the first box could contain £250,000 and there are no higher boxes, so naturally you guess lower. The next box could turn out to be 50p, and there are only two boxes lower so you take a punt and go higher. Let’s presume the next one is £3000 which is practically right in the middle. So do you go higher or lower? It could be £50 or it could just as easily be £50,000 and there is no rhyme or reason to the outcome so all you can do is cross your fingers, click and hope for the best.
As you go along you will learn the importance of welcoming mistakes and understand that many decisions you make won’t the correct one. You can make the wrong call time and time again but it is okay as you will embrace mistakes and learn from them and that is the only way we learn as human beings. On top of that it is important to recognise the possibility that the most critical decisions have the chance of going wrong. In many cases that can add as a discouragement and can advocate towards procrastination, but instead, try and learn to not to stress over them and make the call. If it turns out to be wrong, then come up with a better choice. However, if you do get it right the first time, then it’s time to go onto the next order of business.