Chocolate, Strawberry or Vanilla?
On making choices
Reading about technologies, products and services people create often amazes me, sometimes wishing Oh man, I wish I was doing that! Inevitably, my thoughts wander off to thinking what should I work on.
But then I stumble. How do I pick which problem to solve? Somehow, through some set of choices and some serendipity, I have reached here. What next?
Picking a direction is difficult. Oh-so-difficult. Which field to work in, what form should the product or service be manifested, what kind of customers to serve, etcetera. With so many choices, it gets more and more difficult to commit to one thing.
Some romantics tell me that it will be like love at first sight, you’ll know it when you know it. Some pragmatists tell me to just pick something — anything — and keep going with it.
I am hoping to find a framework to help make a choice when at the crossroads.
Framing it right
Most aspects of a business have frameworks to help them. Marketing — pick up the 4Ps, M&A — get the Boston matrix, product development — would you like to be lean or agile?
So I wonder what dimensions can I arrange my thoughts on to figure out which opportunities to pursue.
The optimization problem is an abstraction of the problem of making the best possible choice from a set of candidate choices.
Mathematics never fails.
The first time I read this in a text book, I thought I had found the way to derive at the answer 42. Turns out though, the skill involved is not so much how to solve the problem, but to form the question correctly.
An optimization problem has the form
maximize an objective function, subject to constraint functions.
Goals and limitations. Nothing new. But the thing about these two dimensions is that they are closely related to each other. If there is some place you want to be, and you are not there, something is holding you back. What is that? Identifying the limiting factor is a step closer to the goal.
For every parameter in your objective, there always has to be a corresponding limitation. The exercise is in finding that tradeoff. If my goal is to build a good product and have enough time to meet with people and develop a hobby, what can I do? Maybe scrape some time from my swimming to meet more people, or be a little slower in building my product to take a woodcarving class.
Applying the filters
But hey, you say, not every thing can be solved algorithmically. True, how about the intangibles? Everyones got their gut feeling, their source of inspiration. And thats a filter worth applying to the choices.
Filters can come from anywhere. They can be your own. They can be inspired. Whats yours?
When I was in high school, my school gave each student a diary — for keeping notes about homework and class schedules, for teachers to send messages to parents, and other official things. As students, however, we used it for playing tic-tac-toes, dots and as a supply of paper to make planes and paper balls for guerrilla warfare…
Anyhoo, on the back of the diary were written these lines, also known as Gandhi’s talisman-
“I will give you a talisman. Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test. Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man [woman] whom you may have seen, and ask yourself, if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him [her]. Will he [she] gain anything by it? Will it restore him [her] to a control over his [her] own life and destiny? <snip>
Then you will find your doubts and your self melt away.”
I never paid much heed to them then, but having made a lot of planes during my classes, I read these lines over and over and they got stuck.
The final picture
Start thinking about choices. Don’t wait for all the data to come in before making the decision, but take a step and course correct on the way.
How do you evaluate your options on what topic to work on, what company to start, what city to live in or what flavor gelato to take?
