2025 Focus and 2024 Review

"Focus is the art of knowing what to ignore" - James Clear

Dear readers thank you for joining me in this journey of discovery into decision-making. Your company, challenge and witness is something I am hugely grateful for that. 3 years and 122 blogs later, I have explored different strands of decision-making - our individual choices, decisions in groups, the art of politics, learning well and many others.

Although we are nearly in February, it's worth reviewing the crazy year year that was 2024.

We covered 10 main topics in 2024:

1. Second order thinking - what are the follow-on impacts from action?

2. Mentoring - what a great relationship looks like

3. Getting the most out of a book - understand the arguments and context

4. Critical thinking - how to assess the validity of arguments you encounter AND to challenge your own beliefs.

5. Free speech - both understanding the liberty and misinformation arguments, and how this has been amplified by social media algorithms.

6. Thinking charitably: Finding the strongest version of your opponent's argument.

7. Democracy warts and all: It's been an amazing ride, but democracy is under threat. Unless we understand under which conditions it works best, we might sleepwalk into a world where it practically no longer functions at all.

8. Populism and the far right: These are catch-all terms to cover some very different things, but what are the commonalities.

9. A need for bolder policy: If a "good" process yields ineffective results, people will lose patience for it. How can we understand the appeal of 'populism' or the 'far right'. What does radical centrism look like?

10. Competing narratives - how they form and the unscientific way they are settled

I am really excited about the topics we will cover in 2025.

1. The big decisions: The world has a number of challenges to face and decisions to make, how are we going to make decisions that face these challenges head on?

   1. The 80/20 rule

   2. Why we need a measure of the quality of life?

   3. How is the UK going to grow? (and are we willing to prioritise it over other things)

   4. What are we going to do about debt loads in the Western World?

   5. How are we going to manage immigration in the Western World?

   6. How are we going to manage fertility rates in the Western World?

   7. How will we manage climate change?

   8. What does AI mean for us?

2. The importance of storytelling

   1. What are stories?

   2. How stories can help us

   3. How stories can hurt us

   4. The elements of a good story

   5. The use of simple language

   6. Humour and stories

3. Ancient mind and modern challenges - some topics below:

   1. Information overload

   2. How our brain evolved and how it interacts with the modern world

   3. How we are being hacked in food, sex, drugs, news and politics

   4. How we need to adapt our thinking to the modern world

   5. Why we should seek discomfort and inconvenience

   6. Assumptions

   7. Why we find it hard to change our mind

   8. Non-linear thinking and how bad we are at it

   9. Regret minimisation

   10. The sweet spot – what is enough?

Do you have an insight on any of these topics? Let's collaborate!

If there is a topic you don't see but would like to see in 1) The big decisions, 2) Storytelling or 3) How our ancient mind interacts with the modern world, let me know.... this is written to encourage engagement about things that matter.

Next week I will be discussing "The 80/20 rule". Until then, please sign up to receive the blog directly to your email at Blog | Deciders.