Farsighted: How We Make the Decisions That Matter the Most

The hardest choices are also the most consequential. So why do we know so little about how to get them right?

Big, life-altering decisions matter so much more than the decisions we make every day, and they're also the most difficult: where to live, whom to marry, what to believe, whether to start a company, how to end a war. There's no one-size-fits-all approach for addressing these kinds of conundrums.

Steven Johnson's classic Where Good Ideas Come From inspired creative people all over the world with new ways of thinking about innovation. In Farsighted, he uncovers powerful tools for honing the important skill of complex decision-making. While you can't model a once-in-a-lifetime choice, you can model the deliberative tactics of expert decision-makers. These experts aren't just the master strategists running major companies or negotiating high-level diplomacy. They're the novelists who draw out the complexity of their characters' inner lives, the city officials who secure long-term water supplies, and the scientists who reckon with future challenges most of us haven't even imagined. The smartest decision-makers don't go with their guts. Their success relies on having a future-oriented approach and the ability to consider all their options in a creative, productive way.

Through compelling stories that reveal surprising insights, Johnson explains how we can most effectively approach the choices that can chart the course of a life, an organization, or a civilization. Farsighted will help you imagine your possible futures and appreciate the subtle intelligence of the choices that shaped our broader social history.

• Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation
• Summary & Analysis of Farsighted: How We Make the Decisions That Matter the Most | A Guide to the Book by Steven Johnson
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• Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming
• Where Good Ideas Come from: The Natural History of Innovation
• How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World
• The Inner Level: How More Equal Societies Reduce Stress, Restore Sanity and Improve Everyone's Well-Being
• The Growth Delusion: Wealth, Poverty, and the Well-Being of Nations
• Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change
• The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump