The Glory Creators Crave Is on the Other Side of Their Actions

You won’t find glory thinking about it.

Darren Matthews
5 min readSep 4, 2022

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Photo by Matt Moloney on Unsplash

It took a step back to the first principles for me to see it.

I was writing a new bonus guide as an enticement to sign up for my newsletter. It is the first of seven guides focused on the fundamentals of decision-making. The Foundations of Choice is the first one I’ve written. Within it, I wanted to escape the bombardment of advice we read on the internet and return to the basics.

We need to understand how and why we make decisions.

It seems astonishing, but this isn’t a subject taught at school. There is no degree available in decision-making. You won’t find a beginner’s guide to decision-making in the library.

It seems accepted that we all know how to make decisions, but we don’t.

But I digress.

I wanted an all-encompassing definition to explain the essence of what a decision is. Of course, Google had one. But I didn’t think much of it. Here it is: “A decision is a conclusion or resolution reached after consideration.”

Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t incorrect, but it felt like something was missing and that inspired me to think of my own.

Here is what I came up with: “A decision is the assessment of information to create the right actions to help us achieve an outcome.”

It was then that it hit me.

There are Three Sides to a Decision

With my definition in hand, three core elements stood out.

  • Information
  • Outcomes
  • Actions

Everyone thinks and talks about information and outcomes. The assessment of information occupies a huge chunk of the self-improvement library.

We drown in a vast ocean of cognitive biases, mental models, razors, and frameworks as we try to manage and process the information we receive. Twitter is awash with advice. Hell, my own website is too.

And then there are outcomes.

The internet is awash with success stories. There is no end to people conducting…

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Darren Matthews

I’m utterly curious about decision-making | Sharing lessons learned from the thousands of decisions I’ve studied and made | Founder https://www.resolve.blog