Golden Zone Principle: a Method for Fast Decision Making in Minor yet High Anxiety Situations

Eli Lyons
Eli Lyons
Jul 20, 2017 · 5 min read

Background

Recently I had three conversations with three different people where my advice was requested. The question being posed in each case, and the main points, were essentially as follows:

  1. How much laundry detergent should I use?

My friend abroad had travel detergent packets and it was unclear how many packets should be used for a load of laundry. There were no instructions for the detergent packets. My friend asked if I could provide some rough calculation based on other laundry detergent use cases.

2. When should I text this girl?

My friend was traveling to an area where a girl lived that he wanted to meet. He texted her in advance to determine if she was available. She said she would let him know later and then didn’t follow up for a few days. My friend wanted to determine if she could meet so he could fix his schedule but also not seem pushy.

3. How should I reply to this VCs rejection email? How thoroughly should I reply?

A VC turned down my friend’s investment offer. The VC wrote a response to explain why they turned down the investment. The response indicated that the VC had some incorrect notions about the company and the market.

Methodology

All three friends in the above scenarios are highly intelligent, and were considering these situations quite deeply. I have been in similar situations, and I know the experience of obsessing over what I should do to get the outcome I wanted, but it was completely unclear how to do so. Well maybe that’s the wrong way to go about it. Maybe trying to carefully optimize a solution is the wrong strategy if you want to maintain your sanity in these kinds of situations. Maybe we should just think about what we don’t want.

While the three scenarios above may seem very different, they share two similar characteristics. The number of possible outcomes is high, but the number of important potential outcomes is fairly limited, and there is high uncertainty/limited reliable information available. Furthermore, the outcomes at the polar ends of a spectrum of similar outcomes tend to be both undesirable. For example, in the first scenario, at first one may consider that there may be a correlation between the cleanliness of the clothes and how much detergent is used. However, the two outcomes at the ends of the spectrum of potential outcomes are the most important to consider. If too little detergent is used the clothes won’t be completely clean, and if you use too much detergent you can cause damage to the clothing. If you decide which of these outcomes you’d most prefer not to happen, you can quickly make a decision to avoid that outcome. In this case, apparently damaged clothes due to using too much detergent is highly undesirable. Therefore clearly it is best to only use one detergent packet for the laundry.

In scenario three, one may think the quality of the relationship with the VC may be correlated with how polite yet corrective the response is. It is difficult to send an email that essentially tells the recipient they are wrong, and expect it to be well received. If my friend wrote a detailed reply explaining why the VC was wrong, the VC may think my friend is sour or still disagree and not want to invest. If my friend does not correct the VC, they will definitely maintain their position of not wanting to invest. Clearly the latter outcome is the least desirable, so it is best for my friend to write the email correcting the VC. Even if he is unable to know how to optimally write it for the VC to change their mind and invest, he can be confident he’s doing the right thing.

In each of the scenarios above, I suggested to my friend to decide on the outcome they wanted to most avoid [detergent stained clothes], and then take action in the zone [golden zone] in which if there was error on the input action [likely], the outcome would err towards another undesirable outcome [dirty clothes]. This works best when you can filter the many potential outcomes into the few that are most important to consider. It may be a bit counterintuitive for some people like myself that want to obtain a very specific outcome, but in the past I often spent too much time obsessing over what to do when there’s a high degree of uncertainty involved, and ultimately a lot out of my control.

Conclusion

The Golden Zone Principle may not only have utility in a variety of minor situations, but major ones as well, such as say choosing whether to take a new job offer. However, other strategies should also be considered. Going back to the laundry example, actually you can start doing the laundry with one packet of detergent, see if the water gets soapy enough and then add more detergent. For the email to the VC you can also just ask them if they want to discuss the specific point of contention or suggest a third party to get more information about the topic. That’s the advice I finally gave by increasing the solution space under consideration. I find when someone comes to me with a problem, they have probably already been considering various solutions for a while, so rather than starting to consider the candidate solutions they propose, one way to help more effectively is to see if you can expand the solution space to areas they haven’t thought of.

Or you can say fuck detergent, fuck clothes and fuck raising money… I call that the Fuck It Principle. Do I look like I have all the answers? My washing machine doesn’t even fucking work properly, it throws an error every five minutes and I have to open and close it to get it going again. Fuck.

Some Related links

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_mean_(philosophy)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buridan%27s_ass

Acknowledgments: After much discussion, Paul Sheridan came up with the name ‘The Golden Zone Principle’

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Eli Lyons

Written by

Eli Lyons

A Hungarian man said to me, 'You don't talk much do you.' Co-founder/CEO of www.tupac.bio. Advisor to www.bisu.bio.

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