Good habits: Young people must learn the steps and mechanisms to make sound decisions. – 123rf.com
DECISION-MAKING is about getting clarity and deciding on something consequential. An individual makes about 35,000 decisions daily, experts say.
The process of making decisions may include not making a decision, which by itself is making a decision; making a snap decision, which means a reaction with or without a strong basis for the decision; and making a responsible decision, meaning deciding after some deliberation with views and evidence.
What and how we think, what decisions we make, and with whom we associate are decisions we all have to make. Mastering the art of decision-making allows us to manage the most important project of all – how to live our lives.
Guiding principles
To help young people learn this crucial life skill, we must have some basic understanding of neuroscience.
Our brain is only fully developed when we turn 18, and it continues to develop and mature until we reach our mid to late 20s.
The prefrontal cortex, which is the last part to mature, is responsible for reasoning and decision-making. Teens will thus reason differently and engage in risky behaviours without realising the consequences.
There are two simple questions that form the basic decision-making framework: Is there a problem to solve? What is the purpose and objective of solving the problem?
To a young person, most decision areas, such as whether to go on a date, are straightforward. Often, their personal experiences provide the basis for decision-making although the results may be biased or prejudiced.
Young people must learn the steps and mechanisms to make sound decisions.
All decisions are based on a simple economic idea: opportunity cost. Add ethical value, time and consequence to the equation and you will understand the decision-making process.
Making a logical inference with empirical or experiential evidence helps us choose from the many alternatives available when making a decision.
When evaluating the alternatives, we need to review and revise the various possible outputs, outcomes and consequences. If our decisions are not accurate, we must then have the courage to make another decision. Young voters, for example, must learn how to choose a leader in an election using a reasoning process.Putting into practice
I have six grandchildren aged between seven and 15. We do many things together, from deciding what TV show to watch and planning a holiday to discussing philosophy and politics.
As an 80-year-old grandfather, I have to be very empathetic, compassionate, patient and even indulgent. But I also have to be occasionally strict when it comes to discipline. So, to teach them decision-making, I encourage them to observe, reflect, conceptualise and act.
We apply these simple steps to everything we do, including how to learn decision-making in playing financial games and making serious financial investment.
For example, we play mahjong and card games which involve decision-making in risk-taking, strategising, human behaviour, remembering, patience development and communication.
A more serious form of training in decision-making we do together is real investment in equity. Each is encouraged to buy small lots of shares in the Nasdaq or Malaysian bourses.
They are taught economic and financial vocabulary like price-to-earnings ratio, dividend yield and inflation. More importantly, they must learn to decide why certain shares are preferred and for what reasons.
So, their decision-making in equity requires them to know a wide range of issues to make challenging decisions like what to buy, and when to buy, sell or hold. They must also understand their personal philosophy and psychology makeup towards risk and return on time and capital.
The decisions are jointly made as the learning process is too complex for them now. My children and I noticed that their experiential learning has accelerated and been internalised cumulatively through such training. Learning to invest is a useful lifelong skill in decision-making as every decision is a form of investment. To learn to create, manage and sustain wealth is a powerful decision-making skill.
The children were also taught to make decisions during the Covid-19 pandemic. Together, we learnt to make lots of critical decisions about well-being and survival.
We talked about what a pandemic is, Covid-19, vaccination and many new terminologies, and addressed questions such as: What does the daily reporting about Covid-19 hospitalisations and deaths mean? How do we arrange their studies online? What about social life? How do we maintain our sanity? How do we create calm and joy during uncertainty?
In relation to nature, we talked about ants in the house and whether we should exterminate or coexist with the pest.
This gave us an opportunity to learn and practise philosophy. I introduced them to metaphysics, ethics, logic and epistemology, using simple illustrations. They started to learn to reason in a more meta way and to understand the meaning of life.
When young people learn to think about small issues, they will develop the confidence and ability to decide on big issues that matter.
When we invest time to mentor them, our future is assured because they will know about justice, and what the good and the bad are. They will know what to believe and what to avoid when choosing leaders to represent the nation.Prof Datuk Dr Paul Chan is the co-founder, vice-chancellor and president of HELP University (Malaysia). The views expressed here are the writer’s own.
