My recent reading in the creative space has inspired me to get the manuscript for the Deciding Better book to the next level. Both Rick Rubin and Haruki Murakami both see the artist as the primary audience for their work, with audience developing as a result of putting work out in the world.
I’ve long been convinced that I have something to say about how we should approach decision making in our lives based on my wide ranging explorations of Decision Theory and the underlying brain mechanisms we use to make decisions. In the end, I’ve come to realize that the seemingly naive view of deciding as an intuitive process is the appropriate one. But it’s rare to find a real justification for the idea that decisions simply come from the heart. And that care of that heart is the core of better decisions.
To finally cut through the rationalist, Cartesian fallacy of rationalism and materialism, I had to understand that rational view of decision making. Since those systems do not turn out to be very useful, I turned to an exploration of how we actually do make decisions, using my own training in Neuroscience. Oddly, I arrived back where I started a very long time ago, with an ecological, systems level approach.
It was my own Hero’s Journey:
and I think it’s worthwhile telling.
The hero’s journey is a classic story structure that has been used for centuries. This timeless storytelling technique encompasses the three core aspects of a protagonist’s journey. Using it in fiction often seems like common sense, but the secret is to use it in nonfiction as well.
Of course all of this reading and notetaking get in the way, but as those who have traveled this road before know, it’s about pushing through to the end once the journey has begun.
