One of my latest obsession is to understand how people make decisions. I read a lot, took classes and discovered many surprising things about this process. But the most important one, was to understand that there are 2 parts of the brain involved in it, one called Amygdala - the lizard brain focusing on negativity and fear, and other one called Cortex, focusing on the positive outcome.
Thinking on how to apply this kind of knowledge in business, I found this article about how the CEO and the founder of Evernote make decisions. A great example on how we can learn from other people mistakes and sometimes saving a lot of effort and a lot of money. In this case, the fear blocked him to invest in Uber few years ago, in a very early stage, and now Uber it’s a billion $ company.
Now he only decide based on the positive outcomes, and I totally agree, as a startup almost everything can go wrong, so you can’t take into consideration the negative ones, because if you do, probably the fear will block you right away.
http://www.techinasia.com/evernote-ceo-phil-libin-decisions/