The Decision Strategist

I just wanted to let everyone know that I am changing the theme for The Decision Strategist. The old one is ok, but I’m looking to make it a little cleaner and increase the amount of space available for text. You’ll probably see it changing over the next few weeks. Feel free to comment on whether you like it’s current look more or less than the old look.

Thanks.

-zot.

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I have spent the last couple of months incredibly addicted to this little game called nethack. It’s free and completely old school, and just terribly awesome. I have yet to beat it. Someday I’ll post a story of my exploits.

I was gearing up the other day to start working on new projects again, and went over my primary goals for 2007. It turns out I did ok. I was officially out of debt in November (not counting the dreaded student loans), made a lot of progress on projects, have been running, and maintained a pretty healthy diet. I could have done better, especially without the devil game referenced above, but I’m not as disappointed as I thought I would be.

Which brings me to two different but related thoughts. First, I feel like my life is composed of a number of cycles. It’s vary noticeable with respect to my work on individual projects. I tend to have a few months of hard work and extreme motivation, followed by a few months of a lack of enthusiasm. But there are other areas: exercise, games, jobs, etc… In fact, I’m starting to think that I only enjoy a particular job for about 2 years before I start to get bored. I spent two years at REMI, have spent two years at BBER, and am now looking at spending two years in the Peace Corps (by the way, I received my medical clearance the other day).

The second thought is about my expectations as I pulled up my list of personal goals for 2007. Why did I feel like I had failed? Are we predisposed to feel unsatisfied with our efforts? To some extent it seems like this is common-place, even in areas where other people think our work is spectacular. At work people and clients have been pretty happy with what I’ve done, but I tend to focus on the aspects of any given project that I didn’t explore fully, or had to make uncomfortable assumptions.

So is it just a difference of information? Clients have only the end results of my work to evaluate, and don’t see all the missteps or excluded possibilities. They don’t have access to full information. Is it yet another case of the signal to noise ratio?

Unequal information and the signal to noise ratio have something to do with it, but then why was I convinced of my own failure to achieve my goals? My perfect information of my own thoughts and actions should have kept me online with how I was actually doing. Of course part of feeling like I didn’t do well has to do with the non-trivial impacts of environment and my state of being, which could be related to any number of factors.

But a bigger force was at work. The major source of my disappointment came from my work on launching decyder. I had hoped that by the end of 2007 I would have a working framework for group decision-making, not to mention well-developed web application development skills. In reality I have only a basic framework, and though I know much more than I did at the beginning of 2007, I still have a long way to go.

This means that one goal, ‘launching a decision-based startup’, overrode my other goals and became a proxy for my success in 2007. Why is this? If you asked, I wouldn’t put it above my other goals, especially ‘developing stronger connections with the important people in my life’. But I think there are several reasons why it naturally rose to the forefront:

• It is measurable. My success or failure can be easily discerned by the health of the project, especially in metrics like number of users (0) and income generated (0).
• It has glamor. The idea fits into a society-wide story in which a lone person creates a business with spectacular success.
• It is perhaps most closely related to my future career (in my mind at least). If ultimately I’d like to be more involved in creative idea implementation, this is a good building block for my development.

The other possibility is that we, or at least I, are inherently optimistic about what we can achieve, and pessimistic about what we have achieved. Most people, programmers especially, have a terribly difficult time estimating how much they can accomplish in a given amount of time, often largely overestimating their abilities.

The key for me was that I realized that even if I didn’t accomplish all of my goals, I had made some fairly significant strides in all of them. Perhaps then the point of goals isn’t so much to accomplish them, but to give you something to work towards if you are floundering.

Baby steps

-zot

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I’m officially on vacation. Doing laundry and packing up to head up to my mom’s house for Christmas. Gonna do some snowboarding, sledding, eating of pie, and other generally good things about life.

I hope all of you have a great week.

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This morning I have nothing for you except some pictures from Albuquerque’s Balloon Fiesta. We woke up at 4:30am and still hit some traffic on our way to Balloon Fiesta Park. If you’ve never wandered around a field full of giant balloons with a bunch of excited kids, you should do it some time. It’s quite the experience.

Inside a giant green person balloon from Germany.

A cool shot of a blue balloon lit with fire.

Darth Vader returns. There was also an AT&T Death Star.

I went home and slept afterward.

On a different note, I have started dreaming in code. This has been going on for a couple of weeks, and is symptomatic of my push to get a demo together for the Ycombinator application, one of the things I’m pursuing while considering what I want to do with my life.

-zot

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