Good decisions require good criteria. But where do those criteria come from? Too often, they are inherited from past decisions, borrowed from others, or created on the fly without careful thought.

First principles decision-making starts with fundamental questions: What are we optimizing for? What trade-offs are we willing to make? What would success look like? Only after clarifying these foundations do we evaluate options.

In this topic, you will learn to develop decision criteria grounded in your actual values and objectives. You will create frameworks that can be applied consistently across similar decisions. You will understand how to evaluate trade-offs explicitly rather than implicitly.