The Decision Strategist

I’m not generally a big fan of teaching myself, but I love a good teacher. Very rarely I run into some information that is transmitted exceptionally well.

There is something about the people who convey information well. You can’t tell whether a person will be good at it or not. It’s kind of hidden. People who are just badass conveyors of information come from all walks of life an are all types of people. They can be very shy and reserved in person, and explode with excitement about their topic when they get on stage.

For example, you have Dick Hardt presenting identity 2.0 in an innovative an simply awesome presentation style. His trick seems to be putting lots of pictures and one word slides together so that the presentation almost turns into a movie.

Or you have Scott Aaronson, who has awesome physics lectures (check out lecture 9) and seems to approach quantum physics in an intuitive and simple way. These are written transcripts of his classes, but they get the point across excellently.

Then there’s Paul Graham, who seems to be able to write essays that touch people deeply. Many people, including me.

For the equality and human rights person in each of us, there is Hans Rosling and his awesome software at Gapminder.org. Hans took old data and build a presentation software that is a great approach to presenting time-series data (and what other dimensional data?).

What is common to all of these people?

I propose the following:

The best people to learn from are those people that are thinking about something completely differently.

Every one of my examples above is interesting and exciting because they aren’t just presenting tired information. They are taking that tired information and thinking about it in a different way. They’re presentations are geared toward letting us see the information from their point of view. In other words, they convey information in entirely new ways.

It isn’t often that you meet someone who is capable of transmitting information in this way, but when you do you can learn a lot by holding on to them.

Do you have favorite presentations or essays that take a subject and make it new and awesome? Post a comment with the link. These are great resources and they should be treasured.

-zot

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When most people think of decision making, they are thinking of either business decisions like How to Compete Against Big Business or Motivating Employees and personal consumption decisions like Buying or Renting, Converting Your Car to Grease Fuel or How to Fight Advertising.

This is probably because these decisions are the easier decisions to make.

We really have no basis for how to go about making the harder decisions. Decisions about whether to leave an abusive spouse, or whether to find a new job if your old one is just ok, or what to do with your life, are much more difficult and messy.

The hardest decisions are ones between a mediocre or negative status quo and a change that would probably be positive, but requires a more negative hump to get over first.

In changing jobs, usually we stick with an unhappy situation far beyond what we would be willing to enter into. Getting a new job has quite a hump, and involves a lot of time, effort, and anxiety, so we are willing to put up with a lot.

In abusive relationships, and not just romantic relationships, but friendships, teacher-student relationships, family, etc… it can seem a lot easier to put up with a negative situation than to face the hump, largely emotional in this case, of speaking to the person and breaking off the relationship (or trying to change it). With relationships there is always the hope that next time it will be better.

The cost of change looks something like this:

(don’t laugh at my poor artwork)

These are the decisions we agonize over and are completely unsure of. They are also hard to make stick because we tend to be unsure about them in the beginning, but become more unsure as the cost of the hump begins to be felt, and we may try to back out.

They are also where we need the most help.

One of my favorite thoughts from Steve Pavlina is that we should not accept situations that we’d rate as mediocre to slightly positive. If we’d rate a situation 6 or 7 out of 10, then we should change it. The problem is that we tend to get complacent with situations that are mediocre, and never get to a situation we’d rate as a 10.

The real problem though is, as always, one of information. We might rate a current job at a 6 or 7, but who’s to say that it’s not actually a 9 and we just have unrealistic hopes for what a job should be? If our relationship is a 6 or 7 is that because of the relationship or because of years seeing media telling us what it should be?

In essence, how do we really know what the limit of possibilities is if we haven’t experienced it? Would we recognize it even if we did?

It reminds me of this question:

If you could have the best sex of your life tonight, knowing that for the rest of your life you’d be comparing every night to this night, would you do it?

We have a hard enough time dealing with decisions when we are facing uncertainty about our choices. In the messy world of personal decisions that have major impacts on our material and emotional lives, the cost hump involved with making changes makes these decisions even more difficult. How do we approach them? What is the right answer? Is there even a right answer?

-zot

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I have two goals that sort of supersede the goals discussed in My Primary Goals. The first is to develop a career that is some kind of creative problem solving in programming and idea-based applications. If that sounds vague it’s because I’m still trying to figure out exactly what it is. The other is to work on developing what I’ve taken to calling ‘The Poetic Life’, which is to say a life that is diametrically opposed to spending the entire time working and then coming home to watch TV. It is a more meaningful (to me, I haven’t shaken my postmodern views entirely yet) life. And yet it’s easy to define what you want in opposition to something else, but very difficult to speak of it in terms of what it actually is.

It is hiking the Andes, backpacking through Africa, working a fishing boat in South East Asia. It is bicycling across America, hiking the Appalachian Trail, and working on a wheat farm. These are experiences that I tend to call ‘raw’ because they are as close to living in the moment and as far away from abstract thought as possible.

But it is also reading difficult books, learning new ways of thinking, and new responses to situations. It is overcoming negatively ingrained behaviors. It is learning and experiencing new depths of emotion and new ways of approaching difficult emotional situations. Something that I call, for lack of a better word, being more ‘engaged’.
Of course, all of this is in relation to my extremely comfortable and safe office job. No doubt I would wish for the humdrum existence of office life if I was facing danger every day.

This truth notwithstanding, engagement and raw experiences are something that you can seek regardless of your lifestyle. Facing those aspects of life that are extremely difficult, whether due to the situation or your own behavior, is some of the most rewarding work we can do.

Typically I respond to feeling like my life is hollow by reducing those things that I view as empty. Replacing watching TV with cooking a new meal or reading a good book. Replacing surfing the internet with the creation of web pages or writing in my journal.

These things are all focused on creating changes in my life that fill it with actions I view as more meaningful. And yet they fall prey to a cycle in which I only keep them up as long as my life feels empty and then I drop them once I feel better. It is yet another version of the problem cycle (something originally discussed on moritherapy), and I could talk about the value of focusing on the positive change instead of the thing you want to change, but right now I’m more interested in trade-off between consumption and production and it’s relation to living the meaningful life.

Much of my definition of the meaningful life involves a shift in my consumption patterns. Instead of consuming TV shows I want to consume meaningful books, for example. Instead of spending the weekend doing nothing, I want to consume surrounding nature via hikes and camping trips.

This consumption is an important part of adding meaning. It expands your thinking, changes your perspective, and makes your life more rich. But it lacks something too. In a way a meaningful life based purely on consumption is like being a groupie to a poet. You read all their stuff and share a lot of the experience, and maybe hang out with them all the time. But you aren’t actually creating anything of your own. It’s a selfish and I think ultimately unfulfilling version of a meaningful life.

Production on the other hand, is much more difficult. It forces actual creative thought on your part and the effort to create, through writing or music or art or code or whatever your passion is, something interesting. Production of new work forces you to explicitly consider new thoughts and ideas, to investigate the complicated nature of your own emotions.

Of course, production of creative work isn’t something that everyone aspires to. Perhaps it isn’t part of your ideal of a meaningful life. For me though, I need to focus more on writing about the hard things, tackling the hard projects, and confronting the hard personal issues. It is from this active pursuit of difficult situations that new growth and learning occurs, and ultimately that which defines the meaningful life.

Not that I’ve every successfully completed the transition. Is it impossible? Is it just an ideal that I can’t possibly attain? I feel like there are people that I know that live much as I describe, but perhaps it’s only because I don’t know them very well.

Give me your thoughts and words.

-zot.

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Disclosure: I hold a small position in an ING bond fund (IDBOX). I’m also not a professional investor. Please don’t take my word for anything you do with your money.

I started looking at investment about six months ago when I realized I would soon achieve my goal of eliminating credit card debt. It is a bewildering world, and back in August I wrote a 2 part series about investing in a recessionary economy (and part II). This post is in a similar theme. Here’s a few basic rules I follow when deciding how to invest:

1. Don’t Buy After a Rally

First off, I never buy an asset (stocks, mutual funds, real estate) when the price has increased. There is no hard and fast rule on how much it has to have increased for me to avoid it, but basically if it’s being hyped by the media or talked about by people, I stay away.

You might miss some really strong growths in specific stocks by not buying in a rally, but it’s also possible that you’ll buy in near the top and only see the value decline substantially. It’s too much of a game for me. I haven’t bought in to tech stocks like Google and Apple for the same reason.

2. Don’t Sell After a Slump

In the same vein, don’t sell when the price drops. A lot of people see a stock’s value going down and sell hoping to avoid losses, but in effect they are locking in price decline that has already happened. Here again it seems like it’s just as likely that you will sell when the value reaches the bottom and so won’t benefit from following gains.

The Current Economic Climate

These rules can be hard to follow though. As fears of inflation (the fed cuts rates again, though read Global Economic Trends for an argument of why inflation is not related to federal interest rates as much as production capacity) mount and the dollar loses it’s value, a lot of people are shifting to gold and silver or foreign markets with their investments. But where do those of us stuck in dollar based investments turn?

I could shift out of dollars into gold or other commodities, but doing so would violate rule #1 given the meteoric rise in the price of gold

In fact, any shift out of US dollars now that dollars have declined heavily would be violating rule #2. Yet I have real fears that the economy is going to be in a substantially worse position in the coming year or more and I suspect that the value of the dollar is only going to decline further.

And if inflation is really occurring at much higher rates than reported, then the situation is worse because inflation is just eating whatever returns my investments are earning and then some.

So the real question is whether it’s better to stay in stocks, risking financial loss when the inevitable burst happens, stay in bonds with low earnings being eaten by inflation, or violate rules #1 and #2 by selling off dollars and buying something relatively more expensive in the hopes that a foreign asset or commodity won’t decline?

About a month ago I shifted my meager investments from a tech mutual fund (IDTOX) to a bond fund (IDBOX). This protects from a coming stock decline, but not from a further decline in the dollar. It’s sort of a middle position in which I’ll lose some value either way:

If stocks decline, the economy worsens and the value of the dollar further declines, I’ll lose value due to inflation

If the value of the dollar recovers, then I won’t be left with commodities I purchased at their peak.

Still, fear is a powerful emotion. If ING Direct Investment had a commodities fund, I’d be hard pressed not to violate my rules and shift into commodities to whether out the storm.

Of course, the value of my investments at the moment are only roughly $500, so it wouldn’t be a disaster in any situation.

I’d be interested in hearing from any readers who have investments or are facing similar decisions. You can flip the situation around to consider debt as well. If the fed is spurring inflation in an effort to stave off financial crisis, it makes no sense to pay more than the minimum on student loans that were consolidated at 3.5% interest (if you were lucky and graduated in 2002).

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