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My latest for the Washington Post

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Should you take the Musk buyout? Here’s a test.

Many of the 2.3 million people working for the federal government have until Feb. 6 to decide whether to take a “deferred resignation” offer announced by the Trump administration, which its FAQ page says includes full pay and benefits until the end of September.

Since retiring from a career in professional poker, I’ve written books about how we can make better decisions, and I coach executives and others on the skill. I am not in the business of telling people what to decide, but in helping people with how to decide. That is what I did this week when two government workers (independently) sought me out for help.

I gave each of them a handful of prompts that required them to take into account their own values and goals as they considered the offer. They each reached a decision that feels best for them. (No, I will not share where they landed!) One appreciated the framework so much that he gave the gist of it to colleagues. After getting that feedback, I crafted a list of prompts here for anyone to use.

There are legal questions swirling around the program that could remain unanswered by the deadline. That’s why I recommend first working through these prompts imagining that the terms will be met in full. Then, I recommend running through them again imagining the terms aren’t fully met.

We need to create distance from the moment at hand when we’re faced with a tough choice so we prioritize long-term, not short-term, thinking, which can be in conflict. There’s a lot of evidence that when we do this mental time travel, we improve our decision quality. That’s why the best decision-making tools nudge us to think about the future. That’s what these decision prompts are designed to do.

To quote the late Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, “nothing in life is as important as you think it is, while you are thinking about it.”

Picture yourself a year from now under four scenarios, where you are either unhappy or happy. Here happy means the sense you are achieving your goals and living a life that aligns with your values. Assign a probability to each:

A. You took the buyout and you are happy you did.
B. You did not take the buyout and you are happy you did not take it.
C. You took the buyout and you are unhappy you did.
D. You did not take the buyout and you are unhappy you did not take it.

In my experience, people tend to balk at putting a probability against scenarios such as these. After all, we can’t know what the chances are. Of course not. We aren’t omniscient. But even if you can’t get it objectively right, it’s important to go ahead and give it your best guess. Why? Because you are already baking an assumption about happiness into your decision, anyway. Implicit in your decision about which path to take is a guess about which path will make you the happiest in the future. It’s better to make that guess explicit. (If you do this often, you get better at making such estimates, especially if you check back on previous predictions.)

Look at the four scenarios. Is there a version of the future with a clearly higher probability of happiness? If so, that’s a path you should probably take. If not, or if you’re just still feeling unsure, let’s go further.

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