Use anti-goals as a decision filter before evaluating opportunities

Run every major opportunity through your anti-goals list before calculating the upside.

Why it works

Most decision-making begins with upside evaluation, which activates optimism bias and a tendency to discount costs. Starting with the anti-goals filter reverses this: if an opportunity violates even one anti-goal, it is eliminated before the upside analysis begins. This removes the cognitive pressure to rationalise — you never get to "but the upside is so good" on a deal-breaker.

How to do it

1. Keep your anti-goals list accessible when evaluating opportunities.
2. Before reading the pitch deck or running the numbers, ask: "Does this violate any anti-goal?"
3. If yes, decline — the evaluation is over.
4. Only open the upside analysis on opportunities that clear the filter.

Evidence

Sequential elimination heuristics, where non-compensatory attributes eliminate options before compensatory evaluation, outperform holistic weighting in complex decisions with many attributes — consistent with the decision-science case for a negative filter step. (mechanistic)

This is a reasonable application of decision heuristic research; the anti-goals framing itself has not been directly studied as a decision tool.

Common mistake

Treating anti-goals as discussion points rather than actual filters — allowing an opportunity’s upside to override a stated anti-goal condition through rationalisation.