Don’t be a donkey
How waiting to make the perfect decision can kill you, and other things
The story of the donkey
Imagine a donkey standing in a paddock. There’s a carrot to the right of him, and a trough of water to the left. He’s hungry for the carrot, and he’s thirsty for the water. The problem is, he can’t decide which way to go. Eventually, the poor donkey dies of thirst.
Don’t be the donkey. Faced with an irreversible life-changing decision, there comes a point at which putting off the decision any longer can have terrible results. While it’s good to have options, delaying a decision could cost you more than you think.
It’s like the ancient saying: if you try to catch two rabbits at the same time, you’ll lose them both. Better to catch them one at a time.
How to not be a donkey
Say you desperately wanted to be a world-class athlete. But you also loved acting from a young age, and had dreams of becoming an a-list actor. You also wanted to make a big impact change in the world, so you part of you wanted to be a politician. Entrepreneurship was in your blood, so you wanted to pursue being a successful businessman too.
Not being a donkey doesn’t mean that you can’t achieve all these goals. Sure, if you pursued any two of the ambitions at once, you’d get nowhere. But if you ticked them off one by one, you might be surprised by the results.
If you’re looking for proof just look to Arnold Schwarzenegger. He did it all, and he’s still going strong.
So don’t be a donkey. Be Arnie instead.
The paradox of options
This all leads to a thing I’ve decided to call the paradox of options:
Delaying a decision simultaneously keeps current options open, but denies yourself of new options in the future.
Arnold recognised this paradox early, and was able to achieve all his seemingly unrelated goals by ticking them off one at a time. First his real estate business took off meaning he could spend more time on training. Then he become bodybuilding champion of the world. His bodybuilding career set him up to have a unique advantage in the movie industry, when he got the lead role in the Terminator series. Finally, the fame and popularity he got from acting career propelled him to become the Governor of California.
Arnold realised he couldn’t achieve all his goals at once, but he was able to pick off goals so that achieving each one would set himself up for the next.
I don’t think he planned from the start for this to all work out. Nor did he need to. All he had to do was to aim at the next most achievable goal, and fire.
For Arnold, closing doors meant opening new doors in the future. This is the counter-intuitive consequence of the paradox of optionality.
The big problem
The problem is, I struggle to take my own advice. I just don’t know how to be more like Arnie. There are two key problems I have knowing when to make decisions.
The first is related to self control. It’s so tempting to keep options open, because part of me wants to do it all. I wouldn’t mind starting a company. I wouldn’t mind being a world-class software engineer. I wouldn’t mind being a well-respected machine learning researcher, either. I need to see the world, too. It’s hard to say no to any one of these.
The second is a problem about the difficulty of decision making, which I wrote in a previous post. In such a complex world, it’s really hard to predict the future consequences of today’s actions.
The reasoning in my head goes like this: In the future I’ll be smarter and have more information about what I want to do, so if I wait I’ll be able to make a better decision.
This is undeniably true, and it makes being a donkey an attractive position at times. But as all donkeys know, waiting too long can have consequences.
What does this all mean in practice?
I need to start closing doors, and look at how I can open new ones. I’m hungry and I’m thirsty, but I am a donkey no more.
