Farsighted: How We Make The Decisions That Matter The Most
Introducing my next book, available in the U.S. this September.
Tl;Dr: I have a new book coming out this September, on the art and science of life’s most difficult choices. It’s called Farsighted: How We Make The Decisions That Matter The Most. Appropriately enough for a book about long-term thinking, it had the longest incubation period of any of my books. But I’m really happy about the way it turned out, and I think you’ll enjoy it. It’s available for pre-ordering now.
About eight years ago, in the summer in 2010, I started taking notes on a book about complex decisions. I had just finished writing Where Good Ideas Come From, which had explored the cognitive and collaborative practices of creative individuals and groups, across a wide range of disciplines and historical periods. That book had been a slog to write, but it was done, and it occurred to me that a similar approach could shine some useful light on a different kind of mental talent: making the hard choices in life.
There had been no shortage of books on the shelves about decision-making at that point: Gladwell’s Blink had come out a few years before; Jonah Lehrer, pre-scandal, had just published a well-received book called How We Decide. Both books had understandably concentrated their attention on instinctual decisions, not deliberative ones. (The “system 1” intuitive brain of Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow would have a similar focus when it was published the following year.) But of course our lives contain many moments where those split-second choices are not the appropriate ones, moments where we have to step back and mull our options for days, weeks, months. I happened to be in the middle of one of those choices — weighing a family move to California after spending two decades, my entire adult life, as a New Yorker — and so the confluence of those three developments pushed me towards writing something on the theme: my interest in continuing to explore the structure of Where Good Ideas Come From; a sense that recent books had not adequately addressed the kind of decision I was interested in; and the day-to-day lived experience of wrestling with one of those decisions myself.
So I started to read around with a bit more focus; I started taking notes on potential stories I could tell, started sketching out chapter structures. Before long I had drafted a proposal and persuaded the good folks at Riverhead that this was a logical continuation of the success we were starting to have with Good Ideas.
And then eight years passed.
We moved to California, and then moved back. (Long story, briefly retold in the book itself.) The Good Ideas focus on the history of innovation led to the multi-platform project of How We Got To Now, which then led to Wonderland. I kept postponing settling down with the decision-making book, but all the while the book lurked in the background. And as it lurked, it got stronger. I started to think more about how literature — and particularly the realist novel — gave us valuable simulations of complex decision-making, ones that could improve our decisions in the real world. I wrote some extended magazine essays about collective decisions and the long-term thinking they required. I began to realize how important prediction is to these kinds of choices, which led me to some fascinating cognitive science research on how the human brain forecasts future events.
About two years ago I finally started writing a first draft. And after many revisions, guided by my gifted editor, Courtney Young, I’ve at long last found my way to the book that I had envisioned so many years ago: Farsighted: How We Make The Decisions That Matter The Most, to be published in the U.S. on September 4. Some of the threads bring back characters from my earlier works: The Invention Of Air’s Joseph Priestley and Ben Franklin make an important cameo in the opening pages, and the book examines two key turning points in the life of Charles Darwin, building on the Darwin stories woven through Good Ideas. But there are also stories drawn from critical decisions in urban planning — New York’s decision to bury Collect Pond in the early 1800s, and to build the High Line in the early 2000s — alongside stories of hard choices drawn from military history, most notably the decision process that led to the raid on Osama Bin Laden’s compound in 2011. There are insights drawn from cognitive science, behavioral psychology, and sociology. But it is also in many ways a book about the importance of storytelling. There’s as much Middlemarch in the book as there is modern neuroscience.
All truly complex decisions are by definition unique ones; that’s part of what makes them so difficult. And so a lot of the strategies that Farsighted proposes are not so much ready-made prescriptions as they are tools or hacks for getting you to see the decision you face with as much clarity as possible, to get around the biases and simplifications and old habits that can distort these kinds of choices. If you’ve enjoyed some of the cross-disciplinary storytelling in my previous books, there is a lot in that vein to enjoy in Farsighted. But I think you will come out of reading the book with something more: a practice for making hard choices in your own life, whether those choices are personal, professional, or civic ones.
One of the realities of life in the publishing world these days is that pre-orders can make a big impact on a book’s ability to reach a larger audience once it’s released. So if you’re thinking that you’re going to be buying Farsighted in September, it’d be great if you would take a few minutes to pre-order it today. You can order it on Amazon, Powell’s, Barnes and Noble, BAM, IndieBound, and iBooks.
I’m excited to bring this book into the world. I hope you’ll get a chance to enjoy it, and as always, I’d love to hear what you think. Later in the summer I’ll share book tour events for September; I look forward to seeing some of you in person then.
