When it comes to taking action in life, we generally tend to postpone doing that so that we ensure ourselves that we take the “right” actions instead of the wrong ones.
This mindset is everywhere, since school instills in us a need to get the “right” answers and not make any mistakes – as if all A’s was a practical thing instead of a made up reality of schooling (nobody can be excellent in everything since becoming excellent depends on resources that are limited such as time and effort and not just on ability or intelligence).
But it is especially prevalent in engineering graduates (myself included) since as engineers we are taught to “always approximate to the margins” as much as we can – the margins here being the “optimal value” we have calculated for a specific problem.
But there is an issue with this statement. The whole concept of an “optimal value” is a mathematical construct that makes sense and approximates to different values based on the number and quality of inputs we feed it.
In other words, if you optimize for money, you will get one solution as better than the others. If you optimize for time, you will get another, if you optimize for both money and time – you might get a third (and so on).
This can be extrapolated for as many things as we can come up with and measure:
- Employee retention
- Market competitiveness
- Product market fit
- Aesthetics
- Envy
- Intelligence etc.
What we optimize for is what tells us what direction we want to take the endeavor in. The math only tells us how far along the axis we are of that approximation – but it can never tell us what we should seek to value in the first place, what to optimize for.
These calculations and mindsets are good when it comes to business, economics, entrepreneurship, engineering and such “directly measurable” endeavors. But what of it when it comes to life?
In life, I tend to see it a bit differently.
I think that when it comes to living life – there are no “wrong moves”.
When it comes to mathematical optimization – the boundaries become simple.
If one thing takes you to the left of the axis from the optimal value then it is a “wrong” action. If it takes you to the right then it is a “right” action (pun unintended). It gets a bit more complicated when you optimize for many values (becoming a second or third dimension optimization problem) but nonetheless it is still a very much “approximate towards” or “approximate away from” matter.
But when it comes to making moves in life – things become a little more convoluted.
In the simplest sense – you also have actions that you take where you either approximate towards the thing or approximate away from it. Dribbling everyday will make you a better basketball player than swimming every day will. One is optimal for swimming and one is optimal for basketball.
Now, for every action you take, there is an axis in which you will be able to find improvement.
For example, the athleticism and physical conditioning you get from doing cardio with swimming will still be good for you. So in a broad multivariate analysis, you would be doing a good thing swimming every day to get your cardio in and thus become a better basketball player.
You might think this is limited to comparing a physical activity to another but let’s take something like writing. Swimming will for sure make you better at basketball than writing in terms of physicality – but is mandatory that you always forgo writing for swimming when you want to become a better basketball player?
Nope.
That entirely depends on what you write about and where you are along your basketball improvements.
If you write about basketball strategy and if you use it to deconstruct how to approach it and what to do and in general as a tool for codifying and organizing your thoughts then it can be just as fruitful as swimming is.
But it also depends on where you are in your journey. A layman will be better off swimming daily to be able to get through the straneous activitu of playing professional basketball – not only because he hasn’t “maxed out” that part of him and because strategy shouldn’t even be on his mind in the beginning, but also because even if it was and he was a god strategic player, he wouldn’t even be able to utilize it if he gets gassed out while playing.
Strategic moves need a calm head and heart – and you can only get that by building it and not wishing for it.
What is the point of all this you might ask?
The original point is that in life it is not as simple as “right or wrong”. In fact, outside of bounded activities like playing basketball – I don’t think there is a general “wrong” at all.
The way I see it, the “right move” is the one that gets you closer to what you want. It directly contributes to what you want.
You want a clean house, you use the vacuum cleaner, then it doesn’t have dust anymore and is clean!
Congratulations! You just cleaned the house and took the “right” move to clean it.
How about you try mopping it first? That might end up being the “wrong” move because you find that when you mop it, some of the dust and grit binds together in a muddy residue that becomes sticky and gets hard to mop up.
Or you find that the glass you broke two weeks ago still has some small shard that found its way out from under the couch and you ended up leaving a big-ass scratch over your hardwood floors causing you to ball up on the floor and cry away your stupidity.
Anyways, the point is that – it was the wrong action right? RIGHT?
Right. It was.
I’m not gonna lie here.
But in a broader and more philosophical way, it was also the right move because it got you to understand that vacuuming first is the right move.
An action we take either is “right” because it gets us closer to what we want directly or is “right” because it gets us closer to what the “right” move is.
It’s kind of like that Edison quote of finding 10,000 ways not to build a light bulb.
Either way, life is infinitely more complex than our bounded endeavors so you might as well use infinitely more complex logic to understand it.
These are just my two cents.
Ciao!