The root of all success is the ability to make good decisions. At the same, I've never thought hard about what it really takes to make good decisions, and I feel like I made a lot of bad ones.

Military/company hierarchies/governments are just structures for decision making. Who gets to make what kind of decisions.

Politics is just decision-making on things that affects multiple people.

I feel like this only gets casual attention. But really it's everything. Logic only gets you so far because most times the goal is wrong or your information is lacking. But I'm not sure I'm always perceptive of when I'm in a bad spot to make decisions.

Poker is an interesting game around this because success is also ultimately determined by decisions. And when I play, I mostly am confused about whether I'm making good ones, yet it should be relatively simple compared to most real-life decisions because it's so structured.

Reading the biography of another person is a bastardized way to get good at making decisions unless the biography explicitly frames their life as a series of decisions and why they went with the ones they did instead of others.

Most frame it as "And then he did this, and then he did that" which isn't interesting at all. You're reading the moves of a game without being able to see the state of the board when the move was made.

If I had to explain why I made most big decisions in my life, it would be pretty embarrassing.

The fancy name for this I guess is just wisdom isn't it? I'm literally just talking about philosophy-- "love of good decision-making".

Existentialism literally starts with "how do you justify doing anything at all". Ethics starts with "what are we trying to do". Epistemology is "how do we understand the situation we're in". Logic is "given we have a goal and have good information, what would make sense".

Some common ways of making good decisions:

- Listing pros/cons
- Polling friends/experts/moral authorities
- Game theory (decision trees)

This list is sad though.