There’s a competition for market share and a competition for mind share. If your competitors are telling better stories than you, if they’re playing the game and you’re not, then it doesn’t matter if their product is worse. They will get the attention. To any customers, investors, partners, or talent doing a cursory search, they will appear to be the leaders in the category. The more people talk about them, the greater their mind share, and the more people will talk about them.

Even when we get the big decisions directionally right, we’re not guaranteed to get the results we want.

We don’t think of ordinary moments as decisions. No one taps us on the shoulder as we react to a comment by a coworker to tell us that we’re about to pour gasoline or water onto this flame.

It’s natural to think these abstractions will save us time and improve our decision-making, but in many cases they don’t. Reading a summary might be faster than reading a full document, but it misses a lot of details— details that weren’t relevant to the person summarizing the information, but that might be relevant to you. You end up saving time at the cost of missing important information. Skimming inadvertently creates blind spots.

Information is food for the mind. What you put in today shapes your solutions tomorrow. And just as you are responsible for the food that goes into your mouth, you are responsible for the information that goes into your mind. You can't be healthy if you feed yourself junk food every day, and you can't make good decisions if you’re consuming low-quality information. Higher quality inputs lead to higher quality outputs.

4.6. Learn from Your Decisions

Many people assume that good decisions get good outcomes and bad ones don’t. But that’s not true. The quality of a single decision isn’t determined by the quality of the outcome. Here’s a thought experiment that will help illuminate this concept.

Imagine you engage in a very thoughtful and intentional decision-making process concerning your career.

Making a good decision is about the process, not the outcome. One bad outcome doesn’t make you a poor decision maker any more than one good outcome makes you a genius.