😫 I'm focusing on too many things at once
Our bias to choose things that 'look good' instead of pursuing specific goals.
Read time: 12 mins.
Today we’re talking about trade-offs - how choosing opportunities that look good against multiple criteria can actually be detrimental to any single criteria you value most.
I like to think I spend my days on things that are moving me closer to my goals. But I rarely step back and review if those activities are actually bringing me closer to them, rather than providing a safe illusion of doing so.
If you’re someone with big personal or entrepreneurial ambitions, and you’ve spent the last few years ‘upskilling’ or ‘waiting for the right time to come’ then I think you’ll enjoy this!
The Tendency to Categorise Things
Before we talk about trade-offs. Let’s set some foundations .
We live in a world where people have a tendency to think of things categorically rather than continuously. Food is healthy or unhealthy. People are introverted or extroverted. Investments are good or bad.
It’s a shortcut to make sense of the world around us. But it’s easy to forget the multitude of variations that exist within categories.
If we catch ourselves thinking in categorical terms, it can be useful to take a step back and evaluate how good/bad something is rather than simply stating that it is good or bad.
For instance, if people treat something as categorical when it should be continuous, you can identify the best options which others don’t see huge differences between, and face little competition to get them.
Conversely, there are situations where something is treated as continuous when it genuinely should be categorical. Working really hard to get the best option in those cases may not be worth the marginal benefit. A good option is good enough.
In the context of goal setting:
When it’s fairly normal to try really hard at something, it’s worth checking that more effort is reliably leading to more of what you care about.
Try Optimising for Something
Being deliberate in what you’re trying to achieve will ensure the majority of your efforts are directed to the most important thing.
If we try to optimise for too many things at once, it can lead to optimising for nothing at all.
In other words, when you are optimising for multiple uncorrelated things, you accidentally restrict yourself to taking kind-of-good actions that marginally advance all of those goals at once. You aren’t moving the needle by very much. But it’s moving. Some progress is better than none - right?
Well, it’s often the case that doing really well in one thing is far better than doing a little well in multiple things.
The reality is, we all have different preferences. If we take the time to really understand what we want, we can optimise for that thing and make real progress towards it. That doesn’t mean we reject everything else, rather we’re saying it’s not our main focus and we can be satisfied with having some of it up to a certain point.
For instance, I was recently offered a job at a $1bn+ FinTech startup backed by Y Combinator (the same investors behind Airbnb, Stripe, Coinbase etc). On the surface, the gig hit multiple criteria of mine - generous pay, high status, steep skill curve, big impact etc. Upon reflection, I discovered that those things are great at all - but my strongest preferences are for starting my own business (or working remotely), and for seeking out novelty/adventure, that is to experience as much of the world as I can in my precious 20s. Why don’t I just optimise for those things and accept slightly less in the other areas.
Suddenly, it became clearer to me that the option space existed far beyond the constraints of my LinkedIn Jobs feed. Now, I’m looking at a 2-month Coding Bootcamp in Bali, a part-time freelance design client that enables me to do YouTube almost full-time, and a highly coveted video editing role with my favourite online creator, Ali Abdaal.
“When facing a situation with multiple potential sources of value, you might be able to get outsized gains by just pushing really hard on one of them. In particular, it’s possible to get gains so big that they more than outweigh losses elsewhere.”
The logic isn’t foolproof, but it’s a useful way to think about things for people like me.
Know What You’re Optimising For.
The final idea of the article is the most important.
“Sometimes working out what you actually want can be really hard — for many, working out what one ultimately values can be a lifetime’s work. However, I’ve been frequently surprised, during my time as an advisor, by how often it’s been sufficient to just ask:
It looks like you’re trying to achieve X here. Is X really the thing you want?”
It’s easy to fall into the trap of working on things that are generally accepted as ‘normal’ to have as a goal. They feel safe. It’s what everyone else is doing, and it’s unlikely anyone will ever stop to question you on why you’re playing money or status games.
At the same time, I’ve fallen into the trap of becoming an “option value addict”. That’s a fancy way of saying commitment issues. I’m someone who loves the idea of preserving as many options as possible, just in case I might want to choose it one day. I realise it’s only valuable to preserve optionality if the options I’m keeping open are things I actually have some chance of choosing. In the example above, I mentioned I’d like to do a coding bootcamp. Yet I don’t want to become a coder. I just think it’s a cool skill to have and might be useful *juuuust in case”. The idea of settling down on options means sacrificing other potential future versions of myself. Instead of letting that thought haunt me, I’m going to keep it real and reflect on how many of those I don’t want to actualise anyway!
As well as optimising for too many of the wrong things, I’ve also caught myself procrastinating behind the guise of ‘investing in myself now so I can make a bigger impact later’. I convince myself I need more skills, more experience or a breakthrough idea before I can start my own business. Or worse, I need some structure through a job, some regular routine, or I’ll be terribly lost. While those things can be true, there’s a risk that we stay in this stage too long and never make that courageous leap to actualising the goals we really want.
Journal Prompts
Is what I’m trying to achieve in this situation the right thing?
Am I trying to achieve multiple things at once? Is that the best strategy?
Does the thing I’m trying to achieve actually lead to something I want?
What would it look like if I focused on the most important thing and dropped the others?
Final Things to Consider
In practice, preferences aren’t linear and trade-offs aren’t clean. This is a simplistic framework for thinking about decision-making.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. We all need psychological safety, loving relationships and physical health. Don’t make the mistake of neglecting these areas over your goals, because whatever efforts you do make can quickly turn to 0.
Consider satisficing. Instead of ditching the other important values, decide how much is enough, meet that benchmark then optimise for the thing you really want.
Full credit of these ideas go to Alex Lawson. I read his article ‘knowing what to optimising for’ on my flight back from Portugal and it triggered all these lightbulb moments. Please give it a read if you’d like to learn more!
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