You Are What You Decide
You Are What You Decide
Eight Keys to Better Decision-making
About the Book
Every day, you make -- or avoid -- decisions. Every day your choices determine who you are. You are what you decide.
Reader praise for You Are What You Decide:Sherm Bodner, President and Publisher, Gannett Central New York Media: “You Are What You Decide is a concise book that distills complex ideas into a straightforward, highly readable framework. Sean Brady combines personal history, business anecdotes and management theory to create an actionable approach to decision-making that will be useful to veteran leaders and novice managers alike.”
Andrew Tait, Chief Technology Officer, Decision Mechanics Limited: “Sean Brady distills twenty years of experience helping people make decisions into the Eight Keys that you need to improve your decision-making. While books like Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow bring theoretical ideas to a mass audience, they are still relatively technical and abstract in nature. You Are What You Decide takes a big step towards real-world decision-making showing how anyone can improve their decision-making capability by adopting a few simple behaviors. Highly recommended.”
John Sipple, Associate Professor, Cornell University: “You Are What You Decide is a great book. While I am typically suspicious of leadership and self help books as a quick diversion and money grab, this is a remarkably insightful and useful book that provides a depth and grounding for your own personal and professional decision-making. Filled with Sean’s own insights and experiences, I find the book immensely relevant and poignant without being preachy or condescending. I look forward to reading it a second time.”
Michelle Bradley, Superintendent, Lockport City School District: “You Are What You Decide presents complex ideas simply in a very engaging, rapid read. While reading the book, I focused on how the Eight Keys could help Lockport City School District’s leadership teams advance their work for improving student achievement. We will use this outstanding resource as we continue to perfect our leadership skills and the use of our data driven inquiry cycle at the classroom, building, and district levels.”
Greg Zlevor, President, Westwood International: “Decision-making is one of — if not the most — critical skills for effective leaders. Knowing how and what to decide is essential in all leadership positions. As a matter of fact, people often become leaders based upon their decision-making skill — it is that important. Thankfully Sean Brady has taken the time to share his abundant wisdom and experience with decision-making in You Are What You Decide. If you are a leader or if you want to lead well, please read about the Eight Keys. You and the people you work with will be glad that you did.”
Table of Contents
- Shooting the rapids
- 1. Commit yourself
- 2. Know your requirements
- 3. Consider all possible options
- 4. Conquer the fear of failure
- 5. Question key assumptions
- 6. Root out biases and fallacies
- 7. Decide deliberately
- 8. Act, monitor and learn
- Be the hero of your own story
- The Eight Keys Quick Reference Guide
- Acknowledgments
- Bibliography
- About the author
The Leanpub 60-day 100% Happiness Guarantee
Within 60 days of purchase you can get a 100% refund on any Leanpub purchase, in two clicks.
See full terms
Do Well. Do Good.
Authors have earned$11,845,077writing, publishing and selling on Leanpub, earning 80% royalties while saving up to 25 million pounds of CO2 and up to 46,000 trees.
Learn more about writing on Leanpub
Free Updates. DRM Free.
If you buy a Leanpub book, you get free updates for as long as the author updates the book! Many authors use Leanpub to publish their books in-progress, while they are writing them. All readers get free updates, regardless of when they bought the book or how much they paid (including free).
Most Leanpub books are available in PDF (for computers) and EPUB (for phones, tablets and Kindle). The formats that a book includes are shown at the top right corner of this page.
Finally, Leanpub books don't have any DRM copy-protection nonsense, so you can easily read them on any supported device.
Learn more about Leanpub's ebook formats and where to read them
Top Books
The Hitchhiker's Guide to DFIR: Experiences From Beginners and Experts
Barry Grundy, Tristram, John Haynes, ApexPredator, Andrew Rathbun, Kevin Pagano, Victor Heiland, Nisarg Suthar, Guus Beckers, and Jason WilkinsA first-of-its-kind crowdsourced Digital Forensics and Incident Response (DFIR) book by the Digital Forensics Discord Server members to share knowledge!
OpenIntro Statistics
David Diez, Christopher Barr, Mine Cetinkaya-Rundel, and OpenIntroA complete foundation for Statistics, also serving as a foundation for Data Science.
Leanpub revenue supports OpenIntro (US-based nonprofit) so we can provide free desk copies to teachers interested in using OpenIntro Statistics in the classroom and expand the project to support free textbooks in other subjects.
More resources: openintro.org.
Ansible for DevOps
Jeff GeerlingAnsible is a simple, but powerful, server and configuration management tool. Learn to use Ansible effectively, whether you manage one server—or thousands.
Maîtriser Apache JMeter
Philippe Mouawad, Bruno Demion (Milamber), and Antonio Gomes RodriguesToute la puissance d'Apache JMeter expliquée par ses commiteurs et utilisateurs experts. De l'intégration continue en passant par le Cloud, vous découvrirez comment intégrer JMeter à vos processus "Agile" et Devops.
If you're looking for the newer english version of this book, go to Master JMeter : From load testing to DevOps
Software Architecture for Developers
Simon BrownA developer-friendly, practical and pragmatic guide to lightweight software architecture, technical leadership and the balance with agility.
Functional Event-Driven Architecture
Gabriel VolpeExplore the event-driven architecture (EDA) in a purely functional way. Learn to design and develop distributed systems that scale. Identify common design patterns in such systems.
Take your functional programming skills to the next level by joining me in developing a distributed system powered by Apache Pulsar and Fs2 streams, all in Scala 3!
R Programming for Data Science
Roger D. PengThis book brings the fundamentals of R programming to you, using the same material developed as part of the industry-leading Johns Hopkins Data Science Specialization. The skills taught in this book will lay the foundation for you to begin your journey learning data science. Printed copies of this book are available through Lulu.
Concurrency with Modern C++
Rainer GrimmC++11 is the first C++ standard that deals with concurrency. The story goes on with C++17, C++20, and will continue with C++23.
I'll give you a detailed insight into the current and the upcoming concurrency in C++. This insight includes the theory and a lot of practice.
Thinking with Types
Sandy MaguireThis book aims to be the comprehensive manual for type-level programming. It's about getting you from here to there---from a competent Haskell programmer to one who convinces the compiler to do their work for them.
Biological Modeling
Phillip CompeauIn this ebook, learn why zebras have stripes, why SARS-CoV-2 spread so quickly around the planet, how to train a computer to classify cellular images, and more!
Top Bundles
- #1
CCIE Service Provider Ultimate Study Bundle
2 Books
Piotr Jablonski, Lukasz Bromirski, and Nick Russo have joined forces to deliver the only CCIE Service Provider training resource you'll ever need. This bundle contains a detailed and challenging collection of workbook labs, plus an extensively detailed technical reference guide. All of us have earned the CCIE Service Provider certification... - #2
Modern C++ Collection
3 Books
Get All about Modern C++C++ Standard Library, including C++20Concurrency with Modern C++, including C++20C++20Each book has about 200 complete code examples. Updates are included. When I update one of the books, you immediately get the updated bundle. You can expect significant updates to each new C++ standard (C++23, C++26, .. ) and also... - #3
Software Architecture
2 Books
"Software Architecture for Developers" is a practical and pragmatic guide to modern, lightweight software architecture, specifically aimed at developers. You'll learn:The essence of software architecture.Why the software architecture role should include coding, coaching and collaboration.The things that you really need to think about before... - #4
Practical FP in Scala + Functional event-driven architecture
2 Books
Practical FP in Scala (A hands-on approach) & Functional event-driven architecture, aka FEDA, (Powered by Scala 3), together as a bundle! The content of PFP in Scala is a requirement to understand FEDA so why not take advantage of this bundle!? - #6
Pattern-Oriented Memory Forensics and Malware Detection
2 Books
This training bundle for security engineers and researchers, malware and memory forensics analysts includes two accelerated training courses for Windows memory dump analysis using WinDbg. It is also useful for technical support and escalation engineers who analyze memory dumps from complex software environments and need to check for possible... - #8
Learn Git, Bash, and Terraform the Hard Way
3 Books
Learn Git, Bash and Terraform using the Hard Way method.These technologies are essential tools in the DevOps armoury. These books walk you through their features and subtleties in a simple, gradual way that reinforces learning rather than baffling you with theory. - #9
Quality Software
11 Books
The Quality Software Bundle is for managers, would-be managers, and any of us who find themselves being managed and confused. This comprehensive bundle covers the entire span of software development approaches, from hacking through waterfall, cascade, prototyping, Iterative enhancement, reusable code, off-the-shelf, to Agile teams. The bundle... - #10
Static Analysis and Automated Refactoring
2 Books
As PHP developers we are living in the "Age of Static Analysis". We can use a tool like PHPStan to learn about potential bugs before we ship our code to production, and we can enforce our team's programming standards using custom PHPStan rules. Recipes for Decoupling by Matthias Noback teaches you in great detail how to do this, while also...