Default Thinking in a Demanding World: We Upgraded Our Tools, Not Our Thinking.
Imagine being dropped into a high-powered commercial kitchen and asked to prepare a five-course gourmet meal. Around you are dozens of high-tech appliances you’ve never used, industrial quantities of ingredients you don’t recognize, and a recipe you barely understand. Oh, and the meal needs to be ready in an hour.
Most of us would be overwhelmed, confused, maybe even panicked. And if what we managed to produce was far from five-stars? That would make sense. Most of us haven’t built the skills to prepare anything very advanced. The expectations are off. The tools are unfamiliar. And the gap between what we’re being asked to create and what we know how to do is massive.
You’d probably fail—because you weren’t prepared for this kitchen.
Now imagine this: what if I told you this is exactly how many people are trying to make life decisions today? We rarely stumble into a commercial kitchen by accident—but more and more, we do find ourselves making some of our most important life decisions in unfamiliar, high-powered information environments.
Decision-Making Is a Craft
Making thoughtful choices in our lives—especially when integrating modern information tools—is a craft. Just like cooking, it involves a combination of skills, experimentation, feedback, and adaptation over time. And just like cooking, it can go terribly wrong when we’re thrown into a new environment without training.
Feeding yourself well is a lifelong process. You start with basics like boiling water or scrambling eggs. Over time, you might pick up knife skills, explore different cuisines, consider nutrition, food allergies, budgeting, and personal preferences. You learn to adjust your meals based on your health, your activity level, your mood, your culture, and your values. Cooking becomes not just an act of survival, but an expression of care and intention.
Decision-making deserves the same level of care. The choices we make—about who we love, how we lead, what we pursue—are just as essential to our survival and well-being. And yet, we’ve often been encouraged to treat decision-making as either purely instinctive or objectively obvious—when in reality, the landscape of decision-making itself has radically shifted. With the incorporation of digital information tools into nearly every aspect of our lives, many of us are now being asked to make decisions in ways that are unfamiliar, unsupported, and increasingly complex. The consequences aren’t just burnt toast—they’re missed opportunities, strained relationships, and chronic burnout. The skill of decision-making isn’t just underdeveloped—it’s being tested in an entirely new environment.
Peanut Butter Sandwich Thinking
Here’s the problem: most of us are still relying on the equivalent of peanut butter sandwich thinking. For many decisions—just like many meals—a peanut butter sandwich is a great option. It’s simple, reliable, and gets the job done. But there are some situations that demand more. Some decisions, like some meals, require greater precision, care, or complexity. And when those moments come, we can’t expect basic skills to carry us through gourmet-level demands. The systems we’re navigating today—dating platforms, leadership decisions, business strategy, even daily priorities—require a far more advanced set of decision-making skills than what we’ve been trained for. And to be clear, decision-making skills aren’t just about pros and cons lists or quick judgments—they include how we process information, how we weigh trade-offs, how we identify our real needs, and how we notice when something in our environment is skewing our perspective. They include how we handle uncertainty, how we collaborate with others (including our tech), and how we manage the pressure of urgency or perfectionism. These are skills that require practice, self-awareness, and the ability to adjust as tools and contexts change.
We’re trying to produce gourmet results with beginner-level recipes. We scroll through complex data, are bombarded by contradictory advice, bounce between unraveling social norms, and toggle between apps—all while trying to make big, meaningful decisions. It’s no wonder we feel disoriented.
We are, essentially, novice chefs given a Michelin-star-level recipe that involves ingredients and techniques we’ve never even heard of. Then we blame ourselves when it doesn’t come out right.
The Reality of the New Kitchen
The real kicker? We’re not even in the same kitchen anymore. For most of human history, we made choices with limited inputs: a small set of trusted people, lived experiences, and a narrow range of options. But today, we’re standing in the middle of a sprawling information warehouse with conveyor belts, AI sous-chefs, and thousands of blinking dashboards.
And no one gave us the manual.
We’ve been dropped into a high-tech kitchen mid-rush, where unfamiliar tools, shifting roles, and invisible algorithms shape the outcome of every meal. Some steps are automated, others require human nuance—but we’re rarely told which is which. So we keep stirring, guessing, compensating. Of course the result feels off. Of course it doesn’t resemble what we thought we were making.
Nailed It—And Not in a Good Way
It reminds me of the glorious chaos that is the show Nailed It, hosted by comedian Nicole Byer. Contestants with little to no baking experience are asked to recreate elaborate desserts. The results? Hilarious, messy, and completely understandable failures. We laugh because we know the contestants were set up to fail.
And yet, when it comes to our own lives, we don’t give ourselves that same grace. We are all contestants on a real-life version of Nailed It, trying to make elegant, high-stakes decisions in a world that’s changed faster than we’ve had time to adapt.
The Call to Craftsmanship
This is not a failure of intelligence. It’s a failure of framing.
We need to start treating decision-making with the same respect we give to any other meaningful skill. We need to become gourmet chefs of our own choices—attuned to our preferences, skilled with our tools, informed about our ingredients, and aware of the larger systems shaping what’s on our plate.
This is the craft I help people build: a system for making decisions that integrates awareness of social influences, cognitive habits, and the architecture of the technologies we rely on. My work is about helping people reimagine and retool their entire decision-making kitchen so it actually supports the life they’re trying to build.
Because you deserve more than just peanut butter sandwiches. You deserve a meal that nourishes, delights, and sustains. You deserve to feel confident in the kitchen you’re working in—even if it has a few robots in it.
Practicing the Craft
So what do you do when you're standing in that kitchen, unsure what step to take next?
Here are a few places to begin:
Pay attention to your inputs. What information are you regularly consuming? Where is it coming from, and how is it shaping your sense of urgency or confidence?
Audit your decision-making tools. Are the apps, platforms, or frameworks you’re using helping you—or adding noise? Could something simpler or more intentional serve you better?
Name the pressure. Are you acting from internal clarity, or reacting to external expectations, timelines, or comparisons?
Notice your default recipes. What patterns do you tend to fall back on when a choice feels hard? Are they still serving you—or just familiar?
These are the early building blocks of decision-making craft: curiosity, intention, and a willingness to pause. The more fluent you become with your inputs and instincts, the more capable you are of navigating complexity with skill instead of survival mode.
If you’re ready to go deeper:
At Remake The Rules, I help people build modern decision-making systems that are thoughtful, collaborative, and adapted for the world we actually live in. Whether you’re navigating love, leadership, or long-term life design, it’s possible to build the kind of craftsmanship that makes even the hardest choices more grounded—and more your own.
Let’s upgrade your decision-making, together.
