Excerpts: “We now understand that farsighted decisions are challenging for many different reasons. They involve multiple interacting variables; they demand thinking that covers a full spectrum of different experiences and scales; they force us to predict the future with varying levels of certainty. They often feature conflicting objectives, or potential useful options are not visible at first glance. And they are vulnerable to the distortions introduced by individual ‘System ‘1’ thinking, and by the failings of groupthink” (p. 24).

“Challenging assumptions, seeking out contradictory evidence, ranking certainty levels–all these strategies serve the divergent stage of the decision process well, helping to expand the map, propose new explanations, and introduce new variables” (p. 65).

“The truth is that we are constantly making predictions about events on the horizon, and those predictions steer the choices that we make in life” (p. 81).

“By forcing yourself to imagine scenarios where the decision turned out to be a disastrous one, you can think your way around those blind spots and that false sense of confidence” (p. 119).

“Another way of mitigating uncertainty is to favor paths that allow modifications after you’ve embarked on them” (p. 141).

“That empathy, that knack for peering into another person’s mind and imagining how some theoretical event might feel, is almost by definition one of the most important virtues in making complex decisions” (p. 207).

Johnson, Steven (2018). Farsighted: How We Make the Decisions That Matter the Most. New York: Riverhead Books.