How To Make Better Decisions (with way less uncertainty) - Joe Hudson - #1171

Joe Hudson says decision-making is “everything” because a business consists mainly of its relationships and the decisions made within it; capital and intellectual property are consequences of earlier decisions. He invokes Jeff Bezos’s reported ambition to build the world’s best decision-making company. The same logic applies personally: smoking, building a company, choosing a spouse, staying married, and handling conflict all depend on decisions. Hudson distinguishes choices, which happen automatically—such as posture or turning toward a grocery store—from decisions, where attention is deliberately invested. A good life is therefore the cumulative result of learning to make better choices and decisions.

Asked whether decisiveness is a personality trait, Hudson says it can be developed, though he frames the process as recognition rather than training. Once someone understands why some actions require deliberation while others happen automatically, more decisions can become choices and the quality of outcomes can improve. The host compares this with Daniel Kahneman’s System 1 and System 2: deliberate thinking can eventually become an automatic response. Hudson says the most indecisive people are often perfectionists, people heavily criticized as children, those taught that their value depends on being right, and people frightened of consequences. They may spend six months analyzing whether to marry someone without acting.

Hudson calls decision-making “100%” emotional, citing Antonio Damasio’s Descartes’ Error and cases where damage to the brain’s emotional center leaves IQ intact but makes ordinary choices impossible. He qualifies that reflexes, such as jumping away from a snake, can bypass this process. For hiring, investing, or choosing a path, however, spreadsheets do not make the decision; people are choosing how they expect to feel. Much of life is organized around feeling loved, valuable, and successful—or avoiding rejection, dismissal, failure, and shame. Logic mainly helps forecast which option will produce the desired emotional state, rather than replacing emotion.

Hudson says fear restricts decisions because people eliminate options that might produce an emotion they cannot tolerate. Someone afraid of rejection will not approach ten women at a bar, while someone comfortable with rejection has more possible actions. The same pattern applies to challenging a boss or taking a business risk: fear of feeling foolish removes the option before it reaches conscious deliberation. Hudson recommends becoming willing to feel rejection, embarrassment, or failure, and even treating repeated failure as evidence of progress. The host illustrates this with his partner James, who was told that a one-in-50 sales rate meant he only needed to knock on 100 doors and accept 98 rejections.

Hudson tells a story about his barber, who painted but avoided galleries because he feared rejection. Hudson offered him $2,000 if he could collect 50 rejections in 60 days. Instead, the barber received two acceptances and began earning a living from his art. Hudson calls the offer manipulative but beneficial: the barber was not afraid of making money, but of feeling like a failure. Changing the scoreboard from “I failed” to “I am winning by getting rejected” made action possible. The host connects this to the wider principle that a person’s emotional tolerance determines which opportunities are available to them.

Hudson says that when people are afraid, their brains narrow possibilities into binary choices: take the job or not, break up or stay, rather than negotiate, lease, modify, or test alternatives. Fear also creates a false sense of finality, as though one decision ends the story. Amazon’s approach—make decisions quickly when they are reversible and slow down only when they are not—is offered as a practical counterexample. Hudson says people should treat decisions as a portfolio, like an investor who does not need every trade to work, rather than as one final verdict. A bad decision today still leaves tomorrow’s decision available.

Hudson explains how he and his wife have handled difficult periods during their 27-year marriage. He says he has effectively been married to several different versions of her as both changed over time. When he feared losing the marriage, he tried to preserve it by abandoning his own principles. Their method became to mourn the marriage as if it were already over: imagine the loneliness, divorce, and life afterward, all the way past the feared endpoint. Once the consequence is emotionally felt, it loses its power. Each person can then show up honestly and decide whether and how they want to remain together.

Hudson says strong decision-making depends on principles that can guide roughly 80% of choices and solve most recurring problems. One business principle is to build first what the team understands least: a car maker should solve the unfamiliar catalytic converter before designing the whole car around assumptions that may later fail. His personal principle is that everything is an iteration. Rather than label an outcome success or failure, he runs experiments, learns, and tries again. He says this mindset helped people at the poverty line lose weight by treating diets as experiments. At his company, employees are expected to run three to five job-related experiments each quarter.

The host compares iterative decision-making with GPS navigation, which reroutes after a missed turn without judging the driver. Hudson tells of a surgeon and dog trainer who stopped praising students emotionally and instead used a clicker to mark correct tendon-tying technique; the students’ learning improved dramatically. Principles provide the same neutral feedback. Hudson says courage emerges when someone follows a trusted principle despite not wanting to. The reward is not merely that the decision works, but that the person acted as the person they want to be. He cites the preference for being true to oneself and failing over being fake and succeeding.

The host introduces audience capture: creators gradually produce what they think their audience wants because certain opinions receive more views and approval. Hudson notes that audiences may not know what they want, and creators can eventually lose contact with their own tastes. The host adds Ethan Strauss’s idea of “criticism capture,” where fear of negative responses drives creators either toward inflammatory behavior or toward bland, overqualified fence-sitting. Jordan Peterson is discussed as an example of someone potentially warped by extraordinary levels of criticism. Hudson connects this to “porn-like” entertainment: endless emotional escalation can leave audiences demanding increasingly inflammatory material, eventually reducing everything to hate.

Hudson says fear appears when a decision threatens identity—for example, the identity of being successful, smart, or accepted. He identifies fear, anger, grief, sadness, helplessness, and shame as common emotions beneath stuck decisions. His daughter’s college essay crisis illustrates the process: she felt pressure to prove herself as a straight-A student, so Hudson told her to stop writing for the colleges and express herself. After allowing herself to feel anger toward the judgment, she produced three essay drafts and continued iterating. Hudson says anger can break the demand to be approved, while grief and fear often emerge when an old identity is released.

Hudson distinguishes decisions from automatic choices such as smoking, scrolling, or reaching for coffee. To change a habit, he recommends slowing down before the action and identifying the emotion present, what the person is avoiding, and what the behavior promises afterward. The host describes waking at 3 or 4 a.m., catastrophizing about the ruined day, and reaching for his phone; even after sleep improved, the distraction habit remained. Hudson calls this an “emotional bureaucracy”: one coping mechanism creates paperwork for the next, such as scrolling, caffeine, anxiety, and further compensations. The solution is awareness and willingness to feel the original emotion.

Hudson says moving countries, leaving a job, or ending a relationship is not fundamentally different from speaking to a barista: difficulty comes from identity being at stake. A person may fear that having no friends in a new country proves something about who they are. He recommends asking what one wants to be and what one essentially is, separating identity from the decision’s outcome. Fear of change is likewise a higher-order fear: the unknown might harm “me,” and that threatened self-image creates the distress. Hudson views transformation periods as opportunities for growth, because people develop most when an old identity and life structure are being disrupted.

Hudson rejects the idea that a decision is bad merely because it fails to deliver the immediate object of desire, such as a cigarette, job, partner, or money. The better question is whether the choice produces what the person actually wants over a week, year, or decade. He says the more unprocessed fear present, the less likely someone is to get the desired result. A practical test is to review the past week or month and find where one did something that felt wrong, or where resentment has accumulated. Resentment signals repeated boundary violations and self-abandonment. Constantly seeking reassurance similarly hands one’s agency and happiness to someone else.

Hudson says confidence in one’s identity makes decisions easier: CEOs eventually learn that making many decisions and testing them is better than obsessing over perfect correctness. He prefers high conviction combined with openness, because action tests beliefs against reality while openness allows correction. Regret often paralyzes people with a feared future that is less painful than the indecision already happening; the host compares this with loneliness that people endure while fearing the loneliness of leaving a relationship. Hudson distinguishes agency from assertiveness: someone can pursue a life aligned with their values without being aggressive. Genuine intuition becomes clearer as self-understanding improves; fear and impulsivity masquerade as intuition when the person cannot see themselves clearly.

Hudson describes a six-day Ayurvedic health retreat involving silence, meditation, a strict diet, and roughly six hours of treatments daily. He experienced large swings between peace and nervous-system agitation, which he valued as an opportunity to observe his reactions. Returning to the decision framework, he says the two major skills are becoming comfortable with difficult emotions so the full option set remains available, and developing principles that reliably guide action. He recommends reviewing the decisions already made in the past year to discover which principles one actually lived by and whether those principles are working. His five-week Great Decisions course is announced for January, with a waiting list opening early access.