I read Ray Dalio’s Principles back in 2017 when it first came out. One of the ideas that stuck with me was ‘believability weight your decision making’.
The idea is that when you’re working through a difficult decision, find people who have a credible opinion on the subject and ask for their advice. Then “weight” the advice according to the people with the most knowledge, experience, or credibility.
This may sound like obvious advice, but in the heat of the moment we often don’t have a reliable framework by which to parse and judge feedback from others.
For example, we may overweight the feedback of family or friends because we care more about their opinion of us vs. strangers. However, there’s a risk they’re more likely to tell us what we want to hear compared to an impartial third party. This is potentially a dangerous combination.
On the other hand, we may be getting advice from online articles, blogs, or even ChatGPT, and we can’t be certain of their source, motivations, or credibility. We need to treat that advice with much suspicion when the stakes are high.
A good rule of thumb is to find the most believable people and triangulate between their advice—picking what we believe to be the highest probability path to success within their range recommendations.