The Decision Strategist

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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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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I spend a lot of my more introspective moments thinking about the interaction between decision making and habitual behavior. We tend to think that we face a decision from a conscious ‘free will’ standpoint, but the evidence suggests that our decision making process are much more like water running down a mountain: as time goes on we create stream beds and eventually rivers, and it gets harder and harder to act non-habitually.

This explains why some people, particularly as they get older, have only a few topics they revisit in most interactions. In my own life I know people who tirelessly revisit:

• The non-existence of god
• The conspiracy of the elite
• Coming judgment day
• Inequality and injustice
• Desiring wealth

In a way these are things that the person is passionate about, and so are a good thing. But at what point are we simply rehashing old conversations without learning anything new?

I think non-habitual actions as a human being are one of the hardest things to achieve. It is something akin to the zen idea of being fully present in the moment, but still fighting the biological impulse to react to a situation in the same way as before.

Of course, some of these reactions are essential for survival and useful for everyday life. But in how many situations have we adopted a behavior that works but is badly suboptimal, or worse, a behavior that is destructive?

Attempting to change ones actions is one of the most difficult things we can do. At times I worry that it’s a futile effort. Even the concept of non-habitual action has problems.

As I get older, and as I see older people who have been stuck on an idea for several years only become more invested in it, I fear that it is an unavoidable trait of humanity that we eventually sink into a more or less automated life.

But there are a few role models that give me hope. Older men and women who are still learning new things and still excited about trying something different. I guess I’d be happy with just being able to change my more destructive habitual behaviors and reactions.

Sometime soon I’ll do through the painful process of looking for habitual choices and interactions that I want to change. Already I know there are topics I’ve been stuck on for several years. Maybe my friends can help point them out to me.

-zot

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