The Decision Strategist

People spend a lot of time trying to figure out what they want to do with their lives. In a sense it’s a real luxury that we can approach that question with a relatively open slate. It wasn’t so long ago that we would only be doing whatever it was our parents did.

While I talked about the PCF method in What am I Doing with My Life? Part I and Part II, and a values-based method in the Follow Up, I also like to use a metaphor exercise in determining what I am doing with my life. The values-based method in the follow up article should probably be incorporated under this idea, but here I am focusing on visualization techniques rather than value techniques.

I suggested a broad method for this sort of thing in Thinking in Metaphors, but thought I would give a more explicit description of the process here.

What do you want to do?

Start out by listing the different options you are considering. Then for each one, consider what metaphors and stories you associate with each one. Here are mine:

Back to School

Thinking about going back to school evokes images of myopic professors who know a whole lot about a narrow field. I think the strongest metaphor is the absent minded professor, deeply involved in their work and rather oblivious to the outside world. The other prevalent image is the teacher motivating his/her students to do amazing things.

Ycombinator

Ah the dashing cavalier entrepreneur, living and dying on the excitement of risk. I’ve talked about how I think entrepreneurs are risk-seeking rather than risk-averse like most people. It seems like the primary metaphor associated with entrepreneurs is the charming swashbuckler.

That’s probably not a very accurate metaphor, as so far my attempts to start a business have all involved rather a lot more hard work that the story involves. Still, the excitement of being in control of your destiny and working on things you are passionate about seems to be holding true.

Peace Corps

Peace Corps volunteers seem a little overeager, but are generally socially conscious and interested in other people and ideas enough to consider living in a substantially different living situation for two years. The strongest metaphor is that of the bright-eyed optimistic student who is going to change the world.

This is another option where I suspect the metaphor doesn’t fit well with reality. The most successful Peace Corps volunteers are probably very hard working and enterprising people. Perhaps even slightly chiseled by life experience.

Status Quo

It’s hard to assign metaphors to your current life, because you are so much more aware of the reality. As a researcher I do some pretty interesting social research, but to be honest much of social research seems rather useless. It gets appropriated by whatever side the results support, and discounted by the other side. This lack of impact is one of the major reasons why I am not satisfied with my job.

Still, my story about researchers in general is that they are intelligent and interesting, but lacked a little initiative and motivation to really get out and make things happen, so they’ve retired to studying what happens instead. This is not to say that research is useless. I think it can be extremely useful in the right situations, just generally not political situations.

Consider other options

Using the collection of metaphors you’ve developed, brainstorm some other options that fit those metaphors. This is easiest if you visualize the activities and let your associations take you down unexpected paths. My list of metaphors and brainstormed options:

• Absent minded professor. There’s not really much else that fits this one.
• Inspiring teacher. This metaphor can actually be filled by any role that is primarily a mentor. A more experienced coworker, team leader, or martial arts teacher.
• Swashbuckler. Deep sea explorer, politician, scuba diving teacher in Mexico and other roles that involve high risk and exploration.
• Obsessed programmer. A martial arts teacher actually fits this role for me.
• Gandhi (Peace Corps). Philosopher, monk, or activist fits this role for me. Not sure what professions fit this. Perhaps director of a non-profit?
• Normal guy (researcher). Advisor, consultant, or something like would fit a similar role.

Beware negative effects

Metaphors can be useful and fun to look at in these kinds of exercises, but they hold a very really danger that I mentioned for a couple of my options, and that is that often a metaphor doesn’t correspond very well to the real experience. This is especially true in the case of cultural icon metaphors such as sports superstars, actors, musicians, entrepreneurs and other roles with a high public esteem.

This kind of exercise is great for uncovering professions or roles that you hadn’t considered at all yet. For me the one that really stands out is the deep sea explorer. Maybe it’s because I’ve been watching Blue Planet lately, but it’s definitely something that is interesting that I had never thought of before.

-zot

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This week’s decision making technique is a little different. Problem restatement is a method designed to break you out of a situation that seems to have no solution. It avoids framing effects by shifting your point of view so that everything looks different. It forces you to think outside the box.

You can use problem restatement for decision making to clarify what it is that you are trying to decide on. Sometimes the decision we think we are trying to make is not the decision we are actually making.

I’ve found problem restatement particularly useful when considering future plans. Right now I am focusing on making What I want to Do With My Life happen, so this exercise is useful in helping me refocus energies.

What’s the current problem?

Start with a definition of the current problem. For me the problem is:

• How can I build this blog, work on decyder and complete applications to Ycombinator and the Peace Corps before the end of September all while working hard at my normal job?

Paraphrase

Paraphrase the problem. This is sort of like brainstorming with the question/problem as the focus.

• What can I do to make sure everything gets done?
• Why do I overload myself with so much work?
• Who would I have to be to accomplish my goals this month?

Reverse the Problem

Consider the reverse of the problem. This works by telling you exactly what things you can do to make sure you don’t solve your problem.

• How can I not get everything done that I need to this month?
  • be lazy (especially watching TV)
  • get distracted by less relevant tasks
  • become demoralized and quit

Narrow or expand the focus

Sometimes the reason a problem seems not to have a solution is that it is focused either too minutely or too broadly. Shifting the focus can give you the right perspective.

• How can I be more productive? (more general)
  • focus on the essential tasks
  • reduce distractions
  • emphasize productive time

• How can I build The Decision Strategist?
  • write quality articles with good information
  • be more active in the decision making community
  • see what articles people have found most interesting and emphasize those types of articles

Shift the focus

We adjusted the focus in the last step, now shift the focus. Often problems with no solution turn out to be not correctly focused on the true problem.

• How can I improve my writing?
  • practice
  • develop information resources
  • try writing in different styles
• How can I make my coding more efficient?
  • practice practice practice
  • take the time to understand tutorials
  • try to solve math puzzles
• How can I build income potential as I work toward starting my own business?
  • investigate advertising potential
  • work with potential clients
  • participate in the decision making communities forums (are there any?)

Ask Why?

The last step is to simply ask why. State the problem/question and then ask why. Continue to ask why until you feel satisfied. I usually start with a question updated by the four tasks I’ve just done. That way in incorporates the work I’ve done to try and make the question more accurate.

The question about building income potential is probably the most spot on. Income isn’t the only reason for wanting to do any of the things I am doing, but it is sort of the bottom line, because I need it to do anything else.

• Q: How can I complete the most necessary actions to develop opportunities to generate income?
  • why?
• Because I want to work for myself on the things I find interesting and useful.
  • why?
• Because life is more meaningful and fun when I am doing that.
  • why?
• Because it is difficult to be completely invested when working for someone else on uninteresting things.
  • why?
• Because it is hard to be passionate about work you don’t care about.

As you can see, by the end you can get down to some pretty philosophical statements. But these statements are good, because they help me focus on the real reason I am trying to do all these different things.

To ensure that I am focusing my energies where I should, I am going to examine each task in terms of how much it does to achieve my primary goals, which in this case are to start my own business and be working for myself on interesting things.

I fount a great (and slightly pink) example from a couple years ago of a student using this method to try not to procrastinate located here. If any of you have done this sort of analysis for anything, I’d love to hear about it.

-zot

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Every Shtikl Counts has a post decrying the use of plans. I think he’s right that you don’t need big plans, but small plans jotted down on a 3×5 index card in a flash of inspiration are incredibly useful.

I think what the post is really trying to say is don’t spend too much time planning. I’m guilty of planning and planning and never getting to the point of launching or even working on my idea. This is may be the only 100% sure way to fail.

I’ve taken to asking myself if I know what the next three steps are; if I do, there is no need to plan.

(edit 9/01/07): Reading over this is seems a little incomplete. It’s always helpful to me to have a goal I’m working toward and a general plan of attack outlined in my head, even if I don’t write it down on paper.

-zot

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A reader left a comment on What am I Doing with My Life? Follow Up with a great suggestion. Here is part of Bob’s comment:

Have you thought of doing a values clarification exercise as part of this process? It starts with listing all your values, then ranking them in importance to you. Then, when an option or event involves two or more of your values in conflict, you will have a new level of clarity of which value to uphold and a new level of objectivity about why you are violating one of your lesser values. This is a great way to reduce the stress and “drag” associated with highly complex circumstances.

This is a really great idea. I’ve done a Primary Life Goals post, but I haven’t explicitly written about my values here.

I followed the procedure Bob describes above, but to list all my values I used the exercise described in Steve Pavlina’s How to discover your life purpose. I modified it slightly so that instead of focusing on life purpose, I’m focusing on personal values.

After getting my list of values, I grouped them into similar categories:

List of Values

I decided to go with a top seven values, ranked in importance. I figure seven because there are lots of fun ways you can refer to seven, such as “The Magnificent Seven” or “Values List Seven”. Also, since I have six groups, having seven top values lets me pick the most important from each group and have one extra slot. I think usually people say to go with five though.

So choosing seven and then ranking them in a simple pareto analysis, I come up with the following ordered list of values:

1. Integrity.
2. Creativity.
3. Connections.
4. Adventure.
5. Personal Growth.
6. Service.
7. Conservation.

This was an extremely difficult process. Typically things just jump out at you when using these techniques, but each of my values resonated so strongly that I had a hard enough time choosing them. Ranking them was nearly impossible!

In the end I ended up ranking them backwards. By choosing the seventh slot first, I was able to come up with a ranking system that I was satisfied with.

I’m still not convinced of it though. If I faced a situation in which I had to choose between working at a very automated job for the rest of my life or acting with integrity, I don’t know that I would choose the option with integrity.

Values are a very fluid thing, but Bob is absolutely write in suggesting that I need to have a defined values list before I go about trying to figure out what I’m going to do with my life.

If I wanted to be more sure of the order of the list, I’d do a sort of paired comparison of each value.

Has anyone else done work like this to determine their values? I know that The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People has a method like this for determining your personal values. I’d be really interested to hear what values lists my readers have come up with, and what process they used to develop them.

-zot

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