Sorting and choosing

One is far more important than the other.

Sorting puts our options into two piles. One pile is the don’t-like, not-good-enough or wrong stack. These are the flavors we don’t enjoy, the paths that are dead ends and the people we simply don’t want to hang out with.

The other pile meets spec. The other pile is good enough.

Choosing among the good pile makes a small difference, but getting the piles right is the hard part. All the time we’re agonizing about our choices, we’re avoiding the hard work of really considering how we sorted things in the first place.

We need to spend less time choosing and more time sorting.

Thanks to Annie Duke for the idea.