The better, more subtle interpretation is that failure is a manifestation of learning and exploration. If you aren’t experiencing failure, then you are making a far worse mistake: You are being driven by the desire to avoid it. And, for leaders especially, this strategy - trying to avoid failure by out-thinking it - dooms you to fail. As Andrew puts it, “Moving things forward allows the team you are leading to feel like, ‘Oh, I’m on a boat that is actually going towards land.’ As opposed to having a leader who says, ‘I’m still not sure. I’m going to look at the map a little bit more, and we’re just going to float here, and all of you stop rowing until I figure this out.’ And then weeks go by, and morale plummets, and failure becomes self-fulfilling. People begin to treat the captain with doubt and trepidation. Even if their doubts aren’t fully justified, you’ve become what they see you as because of your inability to move.

A job should be something you do for that magical period of time when you are the best person for that job and that job is the best position for you. Once you stop learning or stop excelling, that’s the moment for you to pass that spot onto someone who is better fitted for it and to move on to a better role for you.

Exploration is about formulating hypotheses or best guesses; confirmation is about rigorously testing preliminary conclusions. Confirmation turns best guesses into sure bets. As in scientific discovery, the less we know about a phenomenon, the more open-ended our questions. As relevant knowledge builds up, we become more precise about what we seek to learn, and we start to anticipate (more and more accurately) what we will find.

Safeguard Strategy 1: Prevention

You can use the principles behind HALT as a safeguard for decision-making in general. If you have an important decision to make, ask yourself: “Am I hungry? Am I angry or otherwise emotional? Am I lonely or otherwise stressed by my circumstances, such as being in an unfamiliar environment or pressed for time? Am I tired, sleep-deprived, or physically fatigued?” If the answer is yes to any of these questions, avoid making the decision if you can. Wait for a more opportune time. Otherwise, your defaults will take over.

Having a rule means not having to decide at every meal. The executions path is short, and less error prone.

In a quirk of psychology, people typically don’t argue with your personal rules. They just accept them as features of who you are. People question decisions, but they respect rules.

Kahneman told me his favourite rule was never to say yes to a request on the phone. He knows that he wants people to like him, so he wants to say yes in the moment, but after filling up his schedule with things that didn’t make him happy, he decided to be more vigilant about what he agrees to and why.