#5 - The Art of Thinking Clearly¶

Subtitle: The Secrets of Perfect Decision-Making

Author: Rolf Dobelli

Completion: 2026-01-19

Recommended: Yes

Summary: The author has been accumulating ideas over the years about how we all fail due to life tricks, illusions, feelings, and similar factors, and how these can influence our decisions. He even explains how he has fallen for many of them himself (and still does for some) and offers a tip to try not to fall prey to a given cognitive bias (technical term).

How this book is presented (on Amazon, for example) is misleading. It is touted as “life-changing” and as showing how making better choices has the power to transform your life—at work, at home, every day, forever.

Well, this is not what I read in the book. I can certainly use the 99 decision traits—or some of them—presented by the author to make things better, but the author does not present the book or its content in the way the editor does.

The good thing is how these 99 (yes, 99) cognitive biases are presented and how the story of each one is developed.

Each of the 99 examples is limited to three pages. This means the story is short, self-contained, clear, and straight to the point. Even better, when you start reading one of the 99 chapters, you know you can make it to the end before falling asleep or moving on to do something else. As a reader, you are not the victim of endless blah-blah-blah, and this brings joy to reading each and every chapter.

You will recognize yourself as a victim of some (certainly not all) of the cognitive biases. The format of the book makes it easy to come back to it and quickly find the chapter you want to reread to address a given topic.

The author makes no promises about changing your life. He offers experience—personal experience—and knowledge about the topic that he has gathered over the years. Taleb and Kahneman are often mentioned as sources, but you also get insights into, and references to, the work of (mostly) psychologists who first identified these traits.

Using the content to address things in life is ultimately up to the reader.