In practical terms, the crunch times for your thinking skills come when you have to make decisions. Especially the big decisions: changing jobs, moving house, spending large sums of money, living with someone (your partner, your parents, a friend), starting a business, starting a family. Being able to think clearly enough to get these decisions right is essential. A lot of less significant decisions still affect your quality of life and, anyway, they’re good thinking practice for when the big ones come along.
It’s obviously going to matter to you that you get these decisions right. And, more than that, it matters that you know you’re getting them right. Your own confidence in the choices you make is really important – you’re unlikely to regret a decision you believe deep down was right, and the upheaval of changing jobs, moving house, getting married, going to uni, getting the builders in, or whatever, is going to be far less stressful if you do it with an underlying self-assurance that it’s the right thing.
The fact is that only you can make decisions for yourself. You can solicit any amount of advice from friends or experts, but in the end these big choices will always have an emotional and subjective component which only you understand. So you have to be able to think your way through these things for yourself, if you’re going to arrive at a decision that you have real confidence in. The following Rules will enable you to do just that.