Step Two: Inflame

Following is an example of how your internal configuration works. Let’s say you want to buy a computer and hope to get the best price-to-performance ratio available. First off, that choice depends only on what you want. In my case, the ideal choice for writing this book isn’t the same as the one for designing its cover, so the factors to be evaluated must be different. Consequently, we will get different results depending on the recipe we use, even though the assessed factors are exactly the same. This applies to choosing a house, a business, a company, a candidate, and even to certain personal decisions. In the example we’ve chosen, there are dozens of different factors that come into play, but some of them add so little flavor to the final outcome that it would be pointless to use them, much less make them part of the hierarchy.

The first step in the process is to list the criteria and select only those that have a direct impact on what you want to achieve. As I said earlier, the perfect relationship is built by the needs that everyone wants to satisfy. For this example, I’ll use five ingredients:

Each person will play around with the measurements that suit them. If your intention is to have a computer to reproduce or create designs, the graphics card should be added to this equation. If you travel a lot and spend a good part of your time in airport lounges, then battery life is a key element. The specifics never end. However, if there’s an existing criterion you don’t think is that important, you shouldn’t include it because it’ll just slow down the calculations without adding much.

You may think that I’m contradicting myself because the price-to-benefit ratio has subjective criteria, and a while ago I said that we must try to eliminate subjectivity from decisions. And yes, you hit the nail on the head: Every decision will always have elements of subjectivity, so you must be the one who’s in control of them, not the other way around. It’s better to introduce these aspects—such as design, brand, or prestige—and know that they are part of the game, than to introduce variables that aren’t important to you.

After choosing the list of ingredients, let’s move on to review the options. Let’s say there are five computers on the market and you want to see which one works best for you. I invite you to make a chart like the one below and rate each option:

This exercise can be done many ways, but I recommend using a numerical scale to rate your criteria, such as from 1 to 5, no matter how many options you may have. You should use the same rating system whether you’re reviewing three houses or twelve cars. You’ll be reviewing basic elements, such as price and the amount of memory, and more complex ones, such as the brand. For the subjective elements, like the brand, there are several rating options:

Following is an example of a completed chart showing the rate assigned to each criterion in the different options.

	Option 1	Option 2	Option 3	Option 4	Option 5
Brand	5	4	4	3	3
Price	4	4	2	4	5
Monitor Size	4	5	5	3	2
Processor	5	3	3	4	3
Memory	2	3	4	4	5

Once you’ve completed the entire chart, a question will come up: How much of each ingredient should you add to get what you want? It’s time to start writing the recipe. Usually a recipe takes more of some ingredients than others, hence the seasoning. A simple way to start figuring out how to assign measurements is to divide 100 percent by your number of criteria. In our case, there are five, so the balance would be 20 percent. Obviously, if we assign this measurement to all ingredients equally, none will outweigh the other, which is not impossible, but quite unlikely in practice. This isn’t bad, but it will rarely work. The idea is to give a higher percentage to the most important things, while making sure the total is always 100 percent.

The assignment of the percentage values is subjective, so the result may vary from one person to another—exactly what we’re looking for. For this example, I will use these measurements for the different criteria:

The next step is to multiply each criterion’s rating by the assigned measurement, so we can assign measurements to the attributes. Let’s use the brand as an example. As we saw, option 1 had a score of 5 points for this criterion. Given that the measurement we assigned that criterion was 5 percent, we multiply the score by the measurement (5 × 5 percent), and get a result of 0.25 percent.

I’M NOT ALWAYS SURE WHERE I’M GOING, BUT I KNOW EXACTLY WHERE I DON’T WANT TO RETURN.

Repeat this exercise for each of the elements you’re going to review and record the results in a chart like the following one, which, as you can see, has a total of the results per option in the last row.

As you can see, the most qualified computer is the one in option 1. Using the same inputs, but with another recipe, the result would be different, but both would be perfectly valid. This method makes sure that variables you don’t control or that aren’t relevant don’t affect the result.

	Option 1	Option 2	Option 3	Option 4	Option 5
Brand	0.25	0.2	0.2	0.15	0.15
Price	1.2	1.2	0.6	1.2	1.5
Monitor Size	0.6	0.75	0.75	0.45	0.3
Processor	2	1.2	1.2	1.6	1.2
Memory	0.2	0.3	0.4	0.4	0.5
TOTAL	4.25	3.65	3.15	3.8	3.65

EQUIPMENT

If you find using decimals and percentages too complex, here’s another strategy for decision-making, which focuses on the criteria we use or discard when making a decision. Let’s go back to the previous exercise and eliminate the excessive calculations—we’ll cook with fewer containers.

This time, instead of assigning a percentage to each criterion, you will organize the list of criteria in order of importance. Once you have defined this, start with the most important criterion for you, review which options have the best rating for that criterion, and select only the options that have been rated as “good” or “very good” (if using the numerical scale, this would correspond to 4 or 5, respectively). Eliminate the rest.

SUCCESS IS TRUSTING SOMEONE AND BEING RIGHT.

Continue with the second most important criterion and review the scores of those options. Once again, eliminate the options that have the lowest scores. Continue doing this exercise with the remaining criteria until you have only one option left: the chosen one.

This way you’ll get an answer without doing any calculations. Just prioritize your list and eliminate the options that were poorly scored, in order of importance. The advantage of following this method is that you advance faster; however, you may move away from the “best” solution in some cases, the one that we build with the most metrics. I suggest you choose the first method for decisions that require more reflection and the second, faster one for simpler options.

Now let’s move away from the amount of each ingredient in the recipe and explore the second essential component of decision-making: the climate.

CLIMATE/CONTEXT ANALYSIS

The preparation of our decisions is also affected by external conditions. The daily situations we experience shift our perception of certain elements. In the computer example, specific events, such as a bad report on the economy, can change the importance we give to a certain criterion and lead us to make a totally different decision. News, stories, everyday occurrences that we have never related to the subject can trigger or modify our decision.

As I write this book, for example, the world is experiencing an energy crisis. If you were to buy a car right now, perhaps “performance” would become an important criterion you had never thought about.

The climate also has a bearing on social decisions. A clear example can be found in politics: Your rating of a problem like insecurity will increase if you’re the victim of a mugging or a shocking public event takes place days before an election. Knowing this is important because your decision will be largely influenced by the disproportionate value placed on that aspect.

Therefore, you should be aware of this reality and try to regulate the way in which the climate affects you when you have to make a decision, because the result may be influenced by an event that’s been blown out of proportion and reduced the weight you give to the really important elements. Being well informed minimizes the impact of isolated events on our assessment of reality.

The key is to continue working on building your own intelligent decision-making method. The way we obtain information to assess the situation is critical here, especially at a time when there is so much access to manipulated and inefficient data. Rarely have we been subjected to so much fraud, lies, and misrepresentation as during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the outcome was not the best.

	Dollars
Brand	5%
Price	30%
Monitor Size	15%
Processor	40%
Memory	10%