The Decision Strategist

In What am I doing with my life?, I went over a fairly simple method called Pros-Cons-Fix that you can use to make decisions between several different options. I generally like that method, but sometimes I think it leaves something important out: values.

Often times when we are choosing between several different options, whether it is about what kind of car to buy or clothes to wear or what career to pursue, we aren’t making a decision based on the options themselves, but on the image and emotions that each option gives us.

emotions and images are so strong because a lot of our thinking is associative in nature. This can lead to problems like making incorrect associations, but also lets us evaluate complex decisions quickly.

When making long term decisions, I find it helpful to explicitly acknowledge the values that we use to pick something. It’s a simple exercise to sit down with each option and list the emotions and values that come to mind. This, in combination with your primary goals, can help you to see which decision is the right one.

Here are the four options I am considering and the values I associate with each one:

• Education: intensity, learning, executive, geek, studying
• Peace Corps: adventure, change, laughing, doing good work, social responsibility
• Ycombinator: high pressure, high stakes, extreme learning, amazing experience, all or nothing, high roller
• Status Quo: mundane, safe, relaxed

The first thing I noticed after doing this is that it was much easier for me to come up with words for the Peace Corps and the Ycombinator options, which are the more exciting options. The other two were more difficult. I think this points to how easy it is for us to imagine things when we are excited or invested in them. From this exercise alone I can tell that I’m not really interested in Education or the Status Quo.

The second thing I noticed is that out of six phrases for Ycombinator, three of them started with the word “high”. I think this illustrates how much of a gamble I consider this option to be. Either way I expect it to be a great experience, but I in my head I imagine a hard core gambler working around the clock to try and make a fortune. It reminds me of a day trader.

This exercise is really useful, and fleshes out the Pros-Cons-Fix method used earlier. It’s also a more intuitive and comfortable decision making technique. It doesn’t surprise me that I am more at home making a choice based on what I listed above than on the results of the Pros-Cons-Fix method. It is easier for us to make decisions based on feelings than based on reasoning.

I’m not saying that the results of one are any better or worse than the other. It’s important to consider both the emotional/imaginative aspects and the reasoning/logical aspects of big decisions like this.

-zot

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In the first part of What am I Doing With My Life? , I talked about facing different future choices and the first step in the Pros-Cons-Fix method. Today we’ll look at the remaining steps and make a decision based on the results.

I’m trying make a decision between four possible futures:

• Go back to school for an MBA or a PhD
• Join the Peace Corps
• Join Ycombinator
• Stay at my current job

In step 1 you list each option and write down every positive thing that you can think of for it.

Step 2: Cons

In step two, create another list for each option and write down all the negatives. Here are the results for my options:

Life Choices: Cons

Step 3: Fixes

Up till now, we’ve just used a pretty standard approach that most people do intuitively when making a decision: creating a list of positives and negatives for each option. The interesting part comes in now. Going over your list of Cons, figure out a Fix for each one (if possible). Write the Fix next to the Con in your list. If you can’t find a Fix for a given Con, just write “no fix”.

This is what my table looks like after adding fixes:

Life Choices: Fixes

Step 4: Decide!

Now re-list your pros and cons for each option not including the cons with fixes, and make your decision based only on those values. Here is my final table:

Life Choices: Final Pros and Cons

The one thing this table reveals to me is that going back to school seems like a poor choice. It has the least concrete positives and the most concrete negatives. School for me is a fall back option that I really only consider when I feel like I am not getting anywhere.

This is also an unusual set of options in that two options depend on my being accepted into a program, and I would gladly take either of them if I was accepted. To be completely useful, I probably should have included a “Bootstrap My Own Business” option, which would replace my status quo option. It’s a slower result, but also a fairly good one.

The real benefit of this approach, aside from getting us to explicitly consider the positives and negatives of each option, is removing extraneous negatives that can cloud our decision making process.

I considered the same issue from a values based point of view in What Am I Doing With My Life: Follow Up.

-zot

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Right now I’m in the crux of a big decision: what am I going to do with my life? I have a good job and a great relationship. Things are going swimmingly, but I don’t feel like I am getting any closer to my primary goals. When I get stuck in this space I usually end up re-evaluating my future and revisiting my life plan. Since everyone deals with these kinds of questions, I think it makes a good first decision to tackle here.

In these kinds of situations I find it helpful to sit back and take a look at all the possible things I could do. I’m going to use a decision making technique from The Thinker’s Toolkit: 14 Powerful Techniques for Problem Solving called Pros-Cons-Fix. I have four options I’m considering:

Get and MBA (or a PhD in Economics or Computer Science)

As an aspiring entrepreneur, the titles of MBA courses really excite me. Courses like “Strategic Negotiation” and “Technology Entrepreneurship” sound absolutely fascinating. But then there are a lot of posts like this one from Guy Kawasaki that say that an MBA doesn’t help an entrepreneur at all.

I’ve combined the two school options since it really amounts to going back to school. This option would help in that it would further equip me with additional skills that would help me toward my Primary Goals, but would probably further delay getting a business up and running, and there may be faster ways of gaining even better experience, such as taking the entrepreneurial leap.

Join the Peace Corps

A very attractive option. It would give me hands on experience with entrepreneurship and microfinance while working with people in need and getting the chance to experience a different culture. A very adventurous option. I’ll apply to the Peace Corps regardless of what I decide now, because it’s a small time investment and it gives me the option of going when next summer rolls around.

Apply to Ycombinator

Ycombinator is a startup funder and so much more. In truth, I’ll apply here anyway for the same reason as I’ll apply to the Peace Corps. If I can get in it will jump start my entrepreneurial ambitions, but it’s more of a bonus than a necessity.

Stay where I am for another year and then reconsider my position (status Quo).

This is the default position, and though it sounds mundane, it has a number of advantages, like giving me time to build a prototype of my web app and build skills by working on my own projects. Plus, it has the greatest flexibility in terms of being able to change my future plans without any repercussions.

There are 5 steps to the Pros-Cons-Fixes method:

Step 1:

First take out a piece of paper. Write each option in the decision you’re facing across the top. Next, consider each option separately, writing down as many positive things about that option as you can think of.

My table looks like this:

Life Choices: Pros

To be honest, at this point they all seem good. School would force me to do the extra work to increase my skill set and allow me to keep a steady income, Peace Corps is an opportunity to experience great new things, Ycombinator would also be an amazing experience even if nothing came of it, and staying at my current job provides lots of time if I am sufficiently self motivated to make something of it.

In the next post, What Am I Doing With My Life? Part II I look at the rest of the method, and consider a different perspective in What Am I Doing with My Life? Follow Up.

-zot

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This is the first post on The Decision Strategist. As a discussion of decision making strategies and techniques, The Decision Strategist is my attempt to delve further into our decisions and look at what kinds of decision making errors we tend to make and how to avoid them. In this post I discuss my current goals because goals are implicit in our decisions, and having an explicit list of goals can be helpful.

Writing out my goals has been useful in helping me to plot a future course. It informs a lot of day to day decision making as well as the long term decisions I face. The benefit of having gone through a goal writing exercise is that you can use them when facing future decisions to keep you or your business aligned with your values. This is useful in the short term for reminding yourself not to have that snickers bar if you are trying to lose weight, but even better for long term planning. For example, when looking at whether to buy or rent a house, financial factors may matter less than other factors (such as your family). My ultimate decision depends on these factors, all of which relate to my goals and values.

Here are a few guides to the goal setting process that I’ve really liked:

• Everything at stevepavlina.com
• This article at Startup Nation

Near Long Term Goals

• Launch a decision-based startup
• Live in a foreign culture
• Get out of debt and become financially stable
• Develop strong connections with important people in my life
• Maintain a healthy lifestyle

These goals are all related to my general desire to have a fulfilling and interesting life with a career involving programming and technology.

Launching a decision-based startup

This blog is actually a first step in launching a decision-based startup. Here I can talk about decision making techniques I want to implement in the startup, and hopefully discussion will help me understand better what goes in to making different kinds of decisions.

Live in a foreign culture

I’ve always wanted to live somewhere other than the United States; somewhere less than first world. Latin and South America seem really great to me. In trying to plan what I am going to do with my life, one consideration is something like joining the Peace Corps.

Get out of debt

No one likes debt. I have roughly $18,000 in debt from a combination of school loans and the six months after school that I was unemployed. I was lucky enough to begin working at BBER almost two years ago, and I am finally getting to a point where I will be out of debt. I’m hoping to have all my credit card debt paid off by October.

Develop connections with people in my life

When considering life goals, it is important to go beyond career and family. I tend to isolate and retreat rather than push through and work things out with people I care about. This leads to people gradually dropping from view once we don’t share an activity or live together. I want to change that about myself and learn to be better at keeping connected to important people.

Maintain a healthy lifestyle

I generally have a healthy lifestyle. Though I’m not as active now as I once was, I’ve managed to ween myself from soda, limit my chai consumption to once a week, and I’m eating fairly healthily. There are always ways to get better at this though, and I would include doing more gardening as one of those things.

Those goals are long term in the sense that it may be some years until they come to fruition, but I want to get started on them now, so here are some of my short term goals to bring me closer to my long term goals.

Short Term Goals

• Learn to program in python
• Get involved in an open source project
• Develop startup prototype
• Search for ways to reduce costs and save more money
• Re-involve myself in a sport, dance, or martial art
• Spend quality time with my girlfriend
• Take steps to a healthier diet

These are all goals that I want to at least start before the end of 2007, though some of them I’ve already started. They serve as the first stepping stones to achieve my long term goals.

I will refer back to these original goals as I discuss different decision making processes in future posts, and of course post updates to the goals as time goes on.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you find some useful ideas here.

-zot

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