Top Highlights

• Unfortunately, intuition and repetition are unreliable teachers at best. Amateur swimmers’ intuition tells them to take their head out of the water to keep breathing. Their instinctive goal: to stay alive. Then they repeat that head-lifting move over and over until it becomes habit. Competitive swimmers, however, have learned to overcome this compe...
• that the less competent people are, the less likely they are to know it.
• They frequently define their problems in ways that cause them to overlook their best options, for instance.
• “Why do we never have enough time to do it right the first time, but we somehow can find the time to redo it three or four times?”
• Too often, pressed for time and an immediate answer, amateur decision-makers plunge into a decision-making process without stopping to ask questions such as: • What is the crux of the issue that I am facing? • How do I believe decisions like this one should be made? • How much time should I spend on each stage—as a first guess? • Can I draw on feed...