How to make imperfect decisions
👋 It’s Monday! And we’re back.
Issue #214: aging in bursts + avoiding neediness
The hardest decisions have no “right” choice. Listing pros and cons doesn’t always help because (as I found out recently when I had to make a tough decision about a move!) they obscure nuance.
Daniel Rizea, a former engineering director at Google, recently made the tough call to jump ship for a less secure (but more exciting) stealth startup. On Medium, he lays out his entire thought process, going deeper than I’ve seen anyone go into how they made a career move. Rizea explains that “staying at Google would make more sense if I wanted to optimize for money alone, but I chose not to do that.” Instead, he decides to take a pay cut and optimize for learning. Along the way, he confronts a line of demons: loss aversion, fear of change, and the not-super-great feeling of no longer being able to humblebrag at dinner parties that you work at Google. These are very human drives that can prevent us from changing our lives.
“At the end of our lives,” Rizea writes, “we only have the stories we can tell.” Leaving Google would give him a new story.
An underrated aspect of decision-making is not necessarily what you decide, but how you decide. And simply that you decide. In my experience, you’ll learn more from making an imperfect decision and committing to it than trying to reach a perfect decision in the first place.
On Medium a few years ago, Adeline Dimond wrote something about indecision that has stuck with me ever since. One of her early-career friends was clerking for a federal judge. This friend was working late trying to call a case. She was rereading the evidence in some complex property dispute. She’d examined it all several times… and it was almost midnight. The judge knocked on her office door and asked: “Do you have a verdict?”
She didn’t.
“Go home,” the judge said. “At some point, the game is over. Someone wins, someone loses. Just call it.”
👀 3 of my open tabs
- A secret to winning friends and influencing people: “it doesn’t matter what you do as long as those actions aren’t coming from hidden neediness.” (Richard Ngo via Ava Huang)
- Aging happens in bursts. Most people age quickest at 44 and 60. (F. Perry Wilson, MD MSCE)
- Baby Boomers are arguably the last generation named for a meaningful historic event (a ~50% spike in birth rates after World War II). Since then, our generational labels have lost specificity — so much that Pew Research Center recently stopped using them in its trend reports. Douglas Giles, PhD proposes more granular generational labels based on big things that actually changed lives:
🪨 Your daily dose of practical wisdom
Not to get too violent, but: Ask your team to “throw rocks” at your early ideas. It’s a phrase product management coach Isabelle Andrews uses to encourage her team to disagree (productively!) with sketchy thoughts before she shares them more widely.
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Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis
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