Besides its more well-known locations, the United States is home to stunning sites that offer an escape from the masses.

A recent Quora thread discussed unique places in the United States that aren't frequently visited by tourists. 

From the picturesque False Kiva in Utah's Canyonlands National Park, whose exact destination remains a secret, to the crystal-blue Havasupai Falls in Grand Canyon National Park, here are 12 US destinations that you can explore without a massive crowd.

False Kiva is a human-made stone circle located in a remote area of Canyonlands National Park in Utah. It has become popular among photographers thanks to its unique frame that captures clear skies and dramatic thunderstorms of the area, but debates range on whether or not to disclose its exact location (which does not appear on official maps).

Learn more about Canyonlands National Park.

Alvord Desert, located in Harney County in southeastern Oregon, is a dry lake bed offering views of the majestic Steens Mountain and wilderness hiking trails. While parts of the area are privately owned, areas operated by the Bureau of Land Management are open for camping and explore the scenery as long as you come prepared with water, food, and equipment.

Learn more about the Alvord Desert.

The Havasupai Falls, located in the Havasupai Reservation of Coconino County at the southwest corner of the Grand Canyon National Park, are known for their clear blue waterfalls adorned with travertine columns. Hidden amidst the popular Grand Canyon, the Havasupai Falls are not as nearly as crowded as the park considering the eight mile hiking trail you’ll need to take to Supai Village.

Learn more about the Havasupai Indian Reservation.

A big report released Wednesday shows how governments around the world can encourage innovation and entrepreneurship.

The first ever CITIE report has been co-authored by UK innovation charity Nesta, management consultancy Accenture and Catapult!, the UK government initiative to encourage innovation. 

As part of the report, they've ranked what they think are the 5 best cities in the world right now for government support of entrepreneurs. The report takes into account things like regulation, access to data, access to investment and central strategy. 

Surprisingly, San Francisco doesn't make the cut. Crucially, the report only looks at government-linked initiatives and factors, not private sector activity.

5. Amsterdam

Strengths: Government strategy, data 

Weaknesses: Digital government, investment

Startups: Quby, Blendle

CITIE Report: 

Sometimes the medium-sized cities are more capable of experimenting and developing the right policy conditions for innovation and entrepreneurship to flourish. 

The appointment of the city’s first chief technology officer (CTO) in 2014 is increasing the momentum to break down silos and support the co-ordination of citywide innovation projects.

Amsterdam’s ambition to reinvent how the city hall delivers services and engages with its residents can also be seen in the Amsterdam Smart City initiative.

4. Barcelona

Strengths: Access to data, advocating technology through events like Mobile World Congress

Weaknesses: Regulation, investment

Startups: Bitcarrier, Social Point

CITIE Report: 

In the 1990s [Barcelona] developed one of the first city Innovation Districts - 22@Barcelona. The city’s Office for Economic Growth has estimated that of 16 pilot projects supported by 22@Barcelona, 90 per cent have gone on to develop a business based on their pilot. The city is now building on this legacy by actively promoting itself as an urban playground for experimentation by entrepreneurs.

"A notable area of weakness is in its role as Regulator, where Barcelona scores very poorly. The 2014 ban on Uber by a judge in Madrid and the fining of Airbnb by the Government of Catalonia for its breach of local laws make it challenging for Barcelona to absorb disruptive business models into the fabric of the city.

3. Helsinki

Strengths: Access to data, investment

Weaknesses: Regulation

Startups: Supercell, Jolla

CITIE Report:

Helsinki had the most consistent profile of any of the top 5, with a particular strength in the infrastructure roles of Host, Investor and Connector, where it was the number one performer. 

Helsinki’s vision of mobility on demand, a fully integrated public and private transport ‘one click’ solution, carries the scale of ambition you would more typically expect from a tech startup and is defining mobility as a service agenda globally. This mobility ambition is in part enabled by its high score as Datavore, making transport data openly available to entrepreneurs to develop new service offerings.

"Although Helsinki’s performance in the Openness roles of Regulator, Advocate and Customer are respectable, this is the area where there is most room for improvement for next year.

It doesn't get any more high-end than the Burj Al Arab hotel in Dubai.

The Burj even describes itself as the "world's most luxurious hotel."

So it's no wonder that the hotel is also home to a seafood restaurant — Al Mahara — complete with a floor-to-ceiling aquarium where diners can enjoy delicious food while watching colorful fish swim among luscious plants in bright blue water.

I had the chance to eat at Al Mahara on a visit to Dubai years ago and I still consider the lobster I ate there to be the best I've ever had.

It's one of the best fine dining restaurants in the world, but a meal there isn't cheap. According to TripAdvisor reviews for the restaurant, a dinner for two with a bottle of wine costs around $600.

For some context, here's the hotel itself in all its sail-shaped glory. It sits on its own island, connected to the rest of Dubai's mainland by a long driveway.

Guests enter the hotel through the mesmerizing atrium, complete with a fountain, escalator, and a clear view of some of the hotel's rooms outlined in varying shades of blue and green.

Al Mahara means "the oyster shell" in Arabic, and the restaurant's entrance actually looks and feels like an oyster shell. The restaurant is located on the ground floor of the hotel.

The illuminated golden archway opens into an elegant but modern dining room of red carpet, plush seating, and white table cloths.

Diners can get up close and personal with the creatures that are housed in Al Mahara's aquarium, the centerpiece that the restaurant is built around.

Diners will see everything from sharks...

To fish...

To stingrays.

Al Mahara claims to have the best seafood in Dubai. The restaurant's specialties include Alaskan king crab with foie gras ravioli, Wagyu beef with potato gnocchi, line caught sea bass, and dark brown sugar shortbread for dessert.

Tsarkaya Oysters in cucumber and apple broth is another one of the restaurant's specialties.

Al Mahara is fine dining at its finest.

Even the bread looks exquisite.

The cocktails look delicious too. Here's one of the restaurant's strawberry daiquiris.

Diners can then end their meal with a sampling of small dessert treats.

SEE ALSO: Take A Tour Of The World's Most Luxurious Hotel

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Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: 4 major issues for any American who wants to visit Cuba

If you’re in your 50s and have at least something saved for retirement, congratulations: You’re in better shape than almost a third of older Americans.

Now stop celebrating. Even if you have a substantial nest egg, your savings could be quickly whittled down by a number of factors — and one of the biggest is geography.

Deciding where to retire shouldn’t be something you do based on weather or even proximity to kids — let them do the driving — they’re more mobile than you anyway.

If you want to retire rich, and maintain that wealth, you should be looking at important regional factors, such as taxes, local living expenses, and the affordability and accessibility of health care.

To make the search easier, GOBankingRates investigated all 50 states on those three components. We surveyed:

• Taxes: local rates of Social Security income, estate, inheritance, property and sales taxes
• Living expenses: home values, listing prices, local deposit rates and a cost-of-living index
• Health care: average individual insurance premiums, average Medicare payment and the health of seniors who take advantage of regional health care

The result: the best and worst states for retiring rich. Read on for the 10 best and see where you should be moving to when you retire. 

Related: 10 Best and Worst Things to Do When Looking for a Place to Retire

1. New Hampshire

New retirees will have a hard time finding as good a tax haven as New Hampshire, and that’s largely why it topped our list of the best states to retire rich. The Granite State boasts no sales tax, no Social Security income tax, no estate tax and no inheritance tax.

What doesn’t play in the state’s favor is its high cost of living, bolstered by higher-than-average home prices and middling deposit account rates — and the second-highest median property tax in the country.

Still, New Hampshire has one other thing going for it, and it’s a big one: excellent health care. Though residents have to face higher-than-average monthly premiums, Medicare payouts are better than average, and seniors in the state are among the healthiest in the country, according to the United Health Foundation.

2. Delaware

Delaware is another state with low tax rates for retirees, which pushed it to second place on our list. Residents enjoy no sales tax, no Social Security tax and no inheritance tax, though, unlike New Hampshire, Delaware does have an estate tax — 16 percent. Also unlike New Hampshire, however, property taxes in Delaware remain low: At just 0.43 percent of a home's value, the state has the fourth-lowest median property tax in the nation.

In terms of health care, the average amount of Medicare paid out to Delaware residents is among the highest, though the average premium is on the pricier end. Delaware seniors are on the whole healthy — the state is ranked 15th in the country for that.

The only category for which Delaware took a hit in our study was living expenses, with higher-than-average home prices and cost-of-living scores.

3. Idaho

Idaho’s extremely low living expenses catapulted it to third in our study, with one of the lowest cost-of-living scores in the nation — only Mississippi and Tennessee are cheaper. Retirees also have access to higher-than-average local deposit rates to grow their savings and low local tax rates; residents pay no Social Security, estate, or inheritance taxes and fairly low sales and property taxes.

Idaho was bumped out of the top two spots due to less-stellar health care scores: The state is middle of the line (24th place) when it comes to its seniors’ health, and its Medicare payouts are only average. Still, the state’s average individual insurance premiums are low — among the 10 cheapest in the nation.

While political and economic negotiations are underway to end the stiff US-Cuban relationship, the world is flocking to Cuba to experience the surreal time-warp of this tropical nation.

Business Insider decided to do the same and sent three reporters to Cuba's capital, Havana.

We'll have lots of stories about our adventures on the island, which you'll be able to find here. Keep scrolling for an overview of our week in Cuba.

Graham Flanagan and Tyler Greenfield contributed to this report.

Now Watch: We just stayed at an Airbnb in Cuba and this one thing was a big surprise

We booked our visa with Cuba Travel Services and paid $900 for a roundtrip charter flight with Sun Country Airlines from JFK in New York City to José Martí in Havana. We noticed a lot of people on our flight brought flat-screen TVs and other large electronics for their Cuban relatives.

We arrived five hours before our flight and needed every minute to pick up our tickets, visas, check in, and go through security. Here we are moments before we boarded our flight to Havana.

I ate half of the ham and cheese sandwich that was served during the flight. I kicked myself later for not finishing my food because we were in for a real surprise at the Havana airport.

16GB iPhones or iPads don't really have 16GB of available storage. Instead, it's more like 13 GB.

That's because some of your device's storage is being used for important things that make it work, like the iOS operating system.

The following steps will help you maximize the little space you have left on your iOS device, and you should be left with quite a bit if you follow all of them religiously. 

Pick and choose what works best for you and your iOS life.  

Turn off iCloud Photo Library and download Google Photos.

It may seem counter intuitive to download an app when you're trying to save on storage space, but Google Photos is key if you take any photos or videos at all with your iPhone.

With its free unlimited storage, you can save every single photo you take to Google's servers with Google Photos. After that, you can delete them from your phone's storage to free up space.

Sure, Apple's iCloud does the same thing as Google Photos, but you only get 5GB of free storage, which fills up very quickly and often results in annoying popup alerts telling you your iCloud storage is full. 

Turn off iCloud Photo Library by going to Settings > Photos & Camera > disable iCloud Photo Library.

Unfortunately, photos don't automatically delete themselves from your phone once they've uploaded to Google Photos, so it'll require some manual maintenance every once in a while.

Delete videos you no longer watch or need.

Like that movie or TV show you loaded onto your iPhone or iPad for that flight you took last year. And while you're at it, do you really need that music video? It might be a work of art, but if your iOS device only has 16 GB, you need to set your storage priorities straight if you're running out of space. 

Just head over to the Videos app, tap Edit on the top left, and tap the red Delete button next to the video you're deleting.

Don't worry, they'll be saved in iCloud separately from your free 5 GB limit. You can also use Google Photos to upload your videos.

Disable My Photo Stream and don't subscribe to others' shared albums

My Photo Stream will automatically send photos you've taken with one Apple device to any others connected to your iCloud account. For example, a photo you take with your iPad will end up in your iPhone and vice versa.

The iCloud Photo Sharing feature lets you automatically send photos in iCloud to friends and family who subscribe to you. It also works the other way around. Constantly receiving photos from others may be nice, but it'll also fill up your iOS device's storage.

To disable these features, go to Settings > Photos & Camera > and disable My Photo Stream and iCloud Photo Sharing.

A vehicle is stolen every 45 seconds in the United States, according to the FBI. 

Despite the rate of thefts falling in past years due to better technology and increased awareness, some areas are still not great places to park your ride.

The National Insurance Crime Bureau compiled the top 10 cities for vehicle theft by comparing the population of a Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA), with FBI crime statistics and census data.

Compiling the data was no easy task, said Frank Scafidi, Director of Public Affairs for the bureau. Because MSA's often have multiple towns within the area, NICB staff had to comb through each one to find component police forces, and then compute a total number of thefts for the MSA in a given year.

Each area's rate of theft was determined by dividing the total number of car thefts (in 2014) by the estimated population of the area. The resulting decimal was then multiplied by a factor of 100,000 so that the rate corresponds to thefts per 100,000 people.

As states go, California tops the list. San Francisco alone was blemished by almost 30,000 vehicle thefts in 2014. Cities in the Golden State make up seven of the top 10.

The best place to avoid having your car stolen? State College, Pennsylvania had just 34 vehicle thefts in 2014. Impressive, for a place with over 95,000 students and their cars. 

SEE ALSO: The most stolen kind of vehicle in each state

10. San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA

2014 thefts: 10,531
Rate: 539.26

9. Fresno, CA

2014 thefts: 5,260
Rate: 544.53

8. Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA

2014 thefts: 20,268
Rate: 552.04

Most of us will never own a boat, much less a 140-foot luxury yacht. 

A San Francisco-based startup called GetMyBoat wants to change that.

Through the roughly two-year-old company’s app, anyone can be captain for the day by renting one of the over 31,000 vessels listed on the company’s website. 

Available vessels include everything from James Bond yachts to tall ships to jet skis and even canoes.

The average boat owner only uses their boat about 8% of the year. For the other 336 days, the boat probably sits in storage, or at a dock in the marina, the company said. GetMyBoat allows owners to get more use out of their vessel.

As of June, rentals are available on GetMyBoat in 3,300 cities across 135 countries around the world. 

The yacht from Andy Samberg and the Lonely Island's “I’m on a Boat” will you set you back $15,000 a day.

The vessel from the James Bond film the “The World is Not Enough” can be had for a mere $850 per hour, so anyone can feel like agent 007.

GetMyBoat caters to everyone from novice boaters to elite sailors. Their forums allow boaters to find the perfect vessel for them.

WeWork, a startup which rents office space to other startups, is reportedly worth $10 billion— that's twice as much as it was reportedly worth in December.

What's so great about it?

Business Insider's San Francisco office just moved into WeWork's newest building, and we absolutely love it. Step inside and find out why...

The newest WeWork facility in San Francisco is at 535 Mission St., a brand-spanking-new skyscraper just south of Market Street.

Here it is, in all its majestic glory.

You exit the elevator into the lobby.

For Spanish photographer Cristina de Middel, spam emails are more than just a nuisance filtered out of your email inbox every day; they're inspiration.

After seeing an open call for work at a photo gallery in 2008, de Middel — inspired by those phony email requests for money — saw an opportunity to venture outside of her usual sphere of documentary photography.

She began saving her spam emails and soon amassed a collection of over 1,000 of them. Mining outlandish stories of Russian widows and Nigerian lawyers, she imagined how these characters in distress appeared and set about creating for her “Poly Spam” series. 

"I started collecting these emails because I realized they could reflect the state of things in the world … from a very interesting point of view," de Middel told Business Insider.

The real challenge arose when de Middel had to imagine foreign people and places. "I knew what a lion in the Kalahari looked like ... but I had no clue how judges, barristers, and bank employees looked," she said. 

De Middel also discovered that pairing the emails with her photos changed how people saw them. Some people who saw the series asked ask how de Middel found time to travel the world to find these characters. The implausible emails — and photographs made in the studio — suddenly became believable.

As the first non-documentary project she did, it marked the beginning of a long learning process. “I realized I was full of clichés and stereotypes about the world myself and this was a subject that needed to be addressed,” she says. 

De Middel has shared the incredible images and accompanying email texts with us here.

This image was inspired by an email supposedly sent by the grieving widow of a Russian oligarch, her life in danger due to her inheritance.

Here, a banker in the Republic of Togo is looking to dump a cool $18 million in the bank account of the lucky recipient.

For this photo, de Middel used an email apparently sent by a mystical Spanish psychic named Marisol.

On the eve of the 2015 NBA Draft, a consensus has emerged about the top-two picks. After that, though, it's anyone's guess.

We used mock drafts from nine NBA Draft experts as of June 24, the day before the draft, to round up predictions for all 30 first-round picks going into Draft night.

The experts: NBA.com's Scott Howard-Cooper; ESPN's Chad Ford; DraftExpress's Jonathan Givony; Sports Illustrated's Chris Mannix; CBS's Sam Vecenie, Gary Parrish, Zach Harper; USA Today's Derek Bodner; and NBADraft.net.

1. Minnesota Timberwolves — Karl-Anthony Towns, PF/C

Experts: 9 of 9

School: Kentucky

Other possibilities: None

Key expert quote:Givony: "The gap between Towns and Jahlil Okafor has widened significantly in recent months, to the point that it feels like a foregone conclusion that Towns will be going #1."

2. Los Angeles Lakers — Jahlil Okafor, C

Experts: 9 of 9

School: Duke

Other possibilities: None

Key expert quote: Bodner: "In the end, the ability to run an offense through Okafor may be too much to pass up."

3. Philadelphia 76ers — D'Angelo Russell, G

Experts: 7 of 9

School: Ohio State

Other possibilities: Kristaps Porzingis (2)

Key expert quote:Mannix: "It’s hard to believe the Sixers would take Kristaps Porzingis, not with a gaping hole at point guard and Russell, who is well liked in the organization, on the board."

Millennials are set to become the largest group of consumers in America. 

Ad agency Moosylvania asked 1,500 millennials — defined as 20 to 35-year-olds — to vote for their favorite brands. 

The results show which food brands dominate among this subset. 

10. Wendy's

Headquarters: Columbus, Ohio

9. Kraft

Headquarters: Northfield, Illinois

8. Kellogg's

Headquarters: Battle Creek, Michigan

Andy Holz is a German scientist, storm chaser and expert photographer.

His Instagram account explores the chaos of storms, the beauty of clouds, and the precise moment of a lightening strike.

If you're the kind of person who hears thunder and runs for the indoors, Holz's photographs may make you rethink your decision. 

SEE ALSO: This National Geographic photographer has one of the most breathtaking Instagram accounts you'll ever see

Andy Holz is a 31-year-old photographer living in Hürtgenwald, Germany, according to his bios on Instagram and Facebook.

http://instagram.com/p/xfFMYzGEDV/embed/
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He takes all of his photographs with a Nikon D7100 and Nikon D90.

Instagram Embed:
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Although he's based in Germany, he travels to the United States to capture spectacular storms.

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Getting a computer science degree is still one of the best ways to start out in tech.

We broke down the QS World University Rankings by subject and region, to find the top colleges for computer science and information systems in Europe.

The ranking, created by British publisher Quacquarelli Symonds, is based on an institution's reputation with academics and employers, and the number of research citations the school gets per paper.

20. Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich is one of Germany's oldest universities, and is ranked 20th in Europe for computer science. Some of the school's graduates have gone on to work at Google's Swiss offices.

19. You don't even need to study computer science at the London School of Economics to make it in tech. Former CEO and cofounder of taxi app Hailo Jay Bregman holds an MSc in Communications from LSE.

18. Lomonosov Moscow State University is the best place to study computer science in Russia, and is the only Russian school to make it into the QS top 20.

If you’re the type of person who’s into cloud file storage, you’re probably eyeing one of these three companies to work for: Google, Microsoft, or Dropbox.

But they’re also some of the most popular companies in Silicon Valley and extremely difficult to get into.

These 11 questions and suggested answers we found on Glassdoor will help you better prepare for a potential job interview with them.

Google: "How many basketballs can you fit in this room?"

Suggested answer:

"Determine the volume of the room. For example if the room is 10ftx10ftx10ft the volume would be 1000ft cubed. The average mens' basketball has a diameter of 25cm. There are approximately 30cm in a foot. Therefore you could fit one inflated basketball in a 1 foot cubed space. Therefore you could fit 1000 inflated basketballs inside a room with a volume of 1000 ft cubed.

If we can deflate the basketballs and flatten them down to one inch thick, this would allow us to place 12 flattened basketballs in a 1 foot cubed space. Therefore you could fit 12,000 basketballs in a room with a volume of 1000 ft cubed.

It would be more complicated depending on the shape of the room but the process for figuring out the solution would be the same."

(People analyst)

Microsoft: "You have a cake. How many straight cuts do you need to divide the cake into 8 equal pieces?"

Suggested answers:

"First 0 degree. Second 90 degree. Now I have 4 have equal parts. Third From the Centre height wise. (Z-axis)
Now I have 8 equal parts."

"It depends on the shape of the cake."

(Program manager)

Dropbox: "You work on the 60th floor of 100 story building. You walk into your office and find a bomb sitting on your desk. It reads 90 seconds and is counting down. What do you do?"

Suggested answers:

"Since there are only 90 seconds left, removing bomb via bottom floor or roof is not possible since there is not enough time. Place bomb in corner of building so that at least half of blast is going out building away from personnel."

"Break a window, and throw it out?"

(Technical support engineer)

Taxi drivers hit the streets of France to protest on Thursday, bringing some of the country's main transport arteries to a total standstill.

They are officially protesting against Uber's ride-hailing app UberPOP, which allows users to be picked up by uncertified drivers.

But the protest also seems to be about Uber in general. In some places there has been outright violence, with burning tyres, flares, flipped cars, and riot police.

France is not the only place where taxi drivers have protested over Uber's apps, but the demonstrations have been much more violent than in other European cities.

Take a look at the dramatic scenes.

France's taxi drivers erupted into protest on Thursday, with huge travel disruption and incidents of violence around the country.

The drivers are protesting against the American ride-hailing app UberPOP in Paris and around the country.

The protest was specifically organised against UberPOP, the app that allows riders to flag down drivers who don't have professional licences.

In 1970, a farmer called Michael Eavis decided to stage his own music festival on Worthy Farm in Somerset. According to the official Glastonbury website, tickets cost £1 and the 1,500 attendees received complimentary milk to enjoy whilst watching headline acts Marc Bolan and Keith Christmas.

Fast-forward 45 years and Glastonbury is one of the biggest festivals in the world. The musical titan attracted 175,000 revellers in 2014, tickets cost £210 and the pyramid stage played host to some of the biggest names in music history.

But what about the Glastonburys of yesteryear?

While clearing out his cupboard, Reuters photographer Dylan Martinez recently came across some old vintage-style photographs documenting his time at Glastonbury in 1989, and they're awesome.

Martinez and his friends were just a few of the 65,000 people to descend on Worthy Farm that summer.

Ticket prices had gone up from £1 by then. Guests were expected to pay £28 for their ticket to the 1989 festival.

Glastonbury has always had its roots in the American hippie movement of the mid-1960s, which explains festival-goers outfit choices in this image.

Over 180,000 students started a university undergraduate degree in the UK in 2012, meaning all those who did a 3-year course — likely the majority — will just be approaching graduation right now.

Every year there's a scrum for graduate jobs and many young people don't even know what they want to do yet. It can be helpful then just to know where the jobs are.

Job search engine Adzuna has crunched through data on thousands of job listings to find out which industries are recruiting the most graduates in Britain right now.

Scroll down to see the 7 sectors currently offering the most entry-level positions.

7. PR, Advertising & Marketing

Number of graduate vacancies: 1,708

Average pay: £25,776

Current vacancy: Graduate PR Account Assistant

Britain's economic recovery is largely down to the drive in consumer spending. So it's no surprise that the industries getting us spending are also hiring. PR, advertising, and marketing also traditionally have well established paths for getting new blood through the doors.

6. Customer service

Number of graduate vacancies: 1,943

Average pay: £26,259

Current vacancy: Graduate Customer Service Executive

The customer service sector is pretty board, partly explaining why there are so any grad vacancies. The industry spans air hostesses to call centre workers and everything in between — basically anywhere where you're dealing with customers but not directly selling to them.

5. Accounting & Finance

Number of graduate vacancies: 2,937

Average pay: £32,179

Current vacancy: Graduate Tax & Accounting Role

There's only two things that are certain in life – death and taxes. So, couple that fact with the the City of London's recovery and you've got a hiring spree on your hands. Massive tax and accounting giants like EY, PwC and KPMG continue to hoover up graduates for their training programmes each year.

Every day, we're faced with an endless onslaught of decisions, from the trivial (marinara vs. pesto) to extremely important (should you quit your job?).

Too often we simply go with our gut and do what "feels right." And that's not always a bad move.

But there's a problem with that strategy: feelings leave us open to a variety of behavioral and psychological biases — biases that affect the way we think and lead us to make the wrong choices.

By being aware of the tendencies that lead us down the wrong path — and considering some techniques to maximize the chances of finding the right one — we can make better, more rational decisions. There may not be a way to guarantee the future (yet), but these 24 decision-making tips could be the next best thing. 

Max Nisen and Aimee Groth contributed to an earlier version of this article. 

Don't waste time searching for the 'best' option.

Having a lot of choices is great — until it's not. 

In fact, according to researchers Simona Botti from the London Business School and Christopher Hsee of the University of Chicago, we spend so much time seeking out options that it outweighs any benefit of having additional choices. Choices come at a cost — and most of us underestimate how much we're paying.

Accordingly, when you're researching options, set a time limit for yourself, and make sure you're not using your decision-making angst as a procrastination device.

Don't assume everyone else has better information.

We tend to assume everyone knows something we don't and therefore we should do what they're doing (because they must be acting on superior knowledge), but that's not necessarily the case.

Behavioral economist Matthew Rabin and Erik Eyster extended this further, explaining that this herding effect can perpetuate wrong choices: as a group, we seem to overestimate how much people are acting on better private information, and underestimate how much they're simply following others.

Sometimes, people genuinely are privy to real information you're not. But in plenty of cases, they're just following the crowd.

Harness the power of a good nap.

While we previously cautioned against going with your gut, a study from the University of Amsterdam found that there's a time and a place for everything, and when it comes to complex choices, sometimes it's best to let your unconscious mind do the heavy lifting.

In cases where a lot of independent factors are at play, making a decision when you're mind isn't actively focused can actually lead to better, more satisfying choices.

To harness the decision-making power of your unconscious, distract your conscious brain by sleeping or working on something else. 

Marc Andreessen is best known for cofounding the internet browser Netscape and launching Andreessen Horowitz, one of Silicon Valley's most famous venture-capital firms.

Today, a16z has $4.2 billion under management. Andreessen was an early investor in tech companies like Facebook and Twitter and has overseen its investments in hot billion-dollar startups like Airbnb.

Andreessen's net worth was an estimated $600 million in 2012 and has likely increased since — not bad for someone who grew up in a sleepy "no-stoplight town" in rural Wisconsin.

Marc Andreessen grew up in the rural town of New Lisbon, Wisconsin. His dad, Lowell, worked for a seed company. His mom, Pat, worked for retailer Lands' End in customer service.

Source

Andreessen doesn't like to talk about family: “We’ve never had a conversation about his parents or his brother — all he said was, ‘They didn’t like me, and I didn’t like them all that much, either,'" a friend of Andreessen told The New Yorker's Tad Friend.

Source

When he was 9 years old, Andreessen taught himself BASIC programming from a library book. Once he hit high school, he'd already grown bored of his TRS-80, an early personal computer.

Source