The Samurai's Decision-Making Technique

I recently came across an interesting decision-making technique used by Japanese samurai — men who often had to choose fast and without flinching, especially in the middle of a battle. I found it in the work of the psychologist Andrei Dvoskin and decided to dig into the method a little deeper.

It goes like this:

1. The samurai tossed his sword up into the air.

2. While the sword was airborne, he had to make his decision on the matter at hand.

3. The decision had to be final, and acted on the moment the sword hit the ground.

It didn’t matter whether the decision was good, bad, smart or foolish. Even if it turned out to be the wrong one, the samurai didn’t regret it — mistakes are how we learn.

If he couldn’t decide in that span, the matter was put off until the next occasion. And he wasn’t to dwell on it again until that next chance came around. In some cases the decision was handed up to a more senior samurai or to the commander.

And if a samurai failed to decide several times in a row, that was a sign this whole area wasn’t for him — better not to go there at all. Not choosing is also a choice.

For the samurai who struggled with this way of deciding, there were extra drills to sharpen the skill of sizing up a situation quickly.

How can this technique be useful to us?

— Learning to listen to our intuition: fast decisions are often built on the work our unconscious has already done on the situation.

— Letting go of anxiety: indecision tends to breed worry, and a quick choice helps clear it.

— Reviewing the decisions we’ve made: weighing the consequences shows us where methods like this work for us, and where we’re better off using something else.

I’ll add one of my own — the coin toss. The trick is that the choice isn’t made by whether it lands heads or tails, but by what we feel in the instant the coin first shows its face. Say it comes up heads and we feel relief — that’s our answer. But if some part of us quietly sinks because it wasn’t tails, then tails is what we really wanted.

It’s worth saying that techniques like these can serve us for small everyday choices as well as for weightier ones — though the bigger questions are better handled over a few iterations, gathering more information along the way. Because our brain doesn’t only work on a situation when we’re actively turning it over; it works on it constantly, in the background. The decision is almost always already inside us. Often we just need to “draw it out” — without the distortions of a passing mood, and without tangling ourselves up in too much logical reasoning.

Here’s to the best decisions — with no regrets! 😎