I was chatting with an engineer exploring new opportunities yesterday. He was at an inflection point in his career and had two incredible paths before him. One, join a product or venture studio and get his hands dirty building different products simultaneously. Two, find a co-founder and start his own company. Both had immense appeal to him. And he was unsure what path he should take, in fear he might like the other path more once he committed.
The feeling of regret is often inevitable. Especially when you have the incredible options before you, but without the luxury of time. We often ask ourselves, “How much do I value each opportunity?” Most of the time we do a quick mental calculation. We look at the biggest value of each opportunity and their future potentials. For those who prefer a more nuanced approach, we create two (or more) long lists of the pros and cons of each. Both approaches are extremely rational.
Yet, there’s still something missing. Either something that gnaws at our conscious telling us, maybe there’s something we haven’t considered. Or realizing that in constructing these lists we’ve made the decision way more complicated than it needed to be.
Rather the question I find that offers more clarity is, “How much would I sacrifice to obtain this opportunity if I no longer had it?“
Humans are naturally loss-averse. We react more strongly to losses than we do to gains. For instance, we feel the pain of losing our wallet with $100 in it, than we feel the ephemeral joy of winning $100 in the lottery.
At the same time, we tend to take most things for granted until they are taken away. There are a million and one examples. We often don’t appreciate our significant other until they leave us. We take our parents for granted until they are no longer with us. The same is true for friends, homes, personal belongings, and memories.
I also prefer the nomenclature of “I” over “you”. Unlike rational decisions, where it is most insightful to abstract oneself from the situation, irrational decisions require a true introspection of oneself. After all, regrets aren’t usually rational.
While I can’t speak for everyone, my best decisions have often been a permutation of rationality and emotions. When the nuance of each decision leads to an incalculable algorithm and frankly, decision paralysis, I find it useful to channel emotional loss as a tool to make tough choices in life. Pursuing new opportunities, at least for me, is no exception.
Photo by Stormseeker on Unsplash
The DGQ series is a series dedicated to my process of question discovery and execution. When curiosity is the why, DGQ is the how. It’s an inside scoop of what goes on in my noggin’. My hope is that it offers some illumination to you, my readers, so you can tackle the world and build relationships with my best tools at your disposal. It also happens to stand for damn good questions, or dumb and garbled questions. I’ll let you decide which it falls under.
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