Am I working on the right things?

When everything is changing all the time and when the future is foggy at best, how do we know whether we’re working on the right things?

The Right Stuff™

At any given point of time t, given a set of choices {D}, the one decision that has the least amount of conflicts (chaos/ Y) to the foreseeable future to your goal is the right stuff to do. In other words:

eq 1. The tight stuff.

Suddenly putting into an algorithm, finding out the right stuff takes out the stress out of the present and the future. Implementing this would be simple — pick one decision and think as far ahead as you can. Do you see any immediate conflict? Cool, pick another one. Repeat until you find your right stuff and then start working on it.

But what about buyer’s remorse in the future?

Cool, you’ve bought into the idea now and you’re all in with the execution. What happens in the future when you’ll need to pivot? Real possibility right? You repeat eqn 1 again. If you need to change the decision, go ahead and change it! Simple as that. But this obviously comes with a few risks — Pivots, Existential threats, and Buyer’s remorse. Pivots are when you need to re-evaluate your goal and change them, often quite drastically. Existential threats are when your decision fails so spectacularly, there’s only ashes left on the ground. Buyer’s remorse is when you look back on a decision and thought you had a time machine to go back and tell yourself take a different decision.

fig 1. Shut up. Shut up. SHUT. UUUP.

Fail fast

Hard Pivoting is real and frankly, quite demoralising when you put your effort in something but now you’ll have to throwaway all your hard work. It sucks, not gonna lie. It also is the best possibly scenario when you’re taking a lot of decisions and a very necessary step to be comfortable at if you want to build something meaningful. The best way to deal with this is to be very efficient and great at failing.

You see, humans (and machine) intelligence is a feedback system where we’re throwing random darts to a bulls eye in a dark room and hoping some will stick. Theres two way to be good at it. Switch on the lights to be more informed while you’re throwing the dart so you can aim at the board better. This is something you’re already doing with the eqn 1. The second and more important thing is to throw often and throw quick.

Failing fast is absolutely crucial to someone who wants to build anything worthwhile because we all will make bad decisions. How quickly we can realise the pivot point and how devoid of emotions we are while changing our decision is the key to success in a chaotic world.

How do you do this?
1. Feedback: Ask for crisp, contextual feedbacks. If you ask me what Ithink about what you’re wearing today will get a vague: “oh looks nice” comment. Ask me whether the cream shirt goes with a black tie or a blue one, I (..probably will still be clueless) will have a better answer for you.
2. Chunking: Break your decision into smaller sub chunks that can be implemented in a delta time. Rather than — implement twitter 2.0, maybe start by adding an ‘edit’ button to your tweets for a small fee and see if the revenue goes up? If the edit button subscription fails, you’ve learned something fast.
3. Being Stoic: Failures aren’t personal. We make it personal by being stubborn with our decisions. The best way forward for people in a ditch is to stop digging.

The Phoenix mindset

Sh*t happens. Get over it. If you’ve made your decisions, and failed fast and did everything seemingly right; you can still fail so spectacularly, that people might tweet about it.

fig 2 . from the Smithsonian archives of a former US president’s microblog; who, despite the constant negative press covfefe, has always risen from the ashes.

There are a few things you should do if this happens to be honest:

1. Go cry about it. No seriously. Give yourself time to readjust. We’re not machines. We have feelings. They get hurt. Unless you’re a sentient AI, in this case, I’m sorry don’t kill us.
2. Never let a good crisis go to waste. Chaos is a ladder. Use it to your advantage by being a part of the solutions to the crisis.
3. Do a retrospective. Gather crisp feedback. Act on them. List them all down. Start writing a doc with Problem — Solutions — Implementation structure. Send this doc to your partners, friends, people you trust and are available to help.
4. Be visible while you’re in recovery. This myth of working in the shadows and coming up with a success story is BS. This is the age of (in)visibility. The last thing you want to do is to be forgotten when you’re runnign behind. This doesn’t mean you need to post obnoxious self-care messages in linkedin. This means, not letting your friends, support system, business contacts and collaborators go cold. Be in touch and be available with everyone.

Wish I had a time machine

to go back in time and slap myself across the face and say wtf were you thinking idiot?

The right thing to do at any point is time bound. The man/woman/Netflix show you were in love with and spend money on in November, might just be a sad memory in March.

Mate, I didn’t know Kevin Spacey were, well, actually Kevin Spacey in real life! Do I still regret loving and watching almost all his work multiple times? No! Would I be able to watch him again? Also, no!

Hindsight is 20/20 and the worst possible way to spend our time is to think about changing the past as that is the ONLY thing we can’t change anymore. So concentrate on the present and the Future. Go do the eqn 1. Take lessons from the past and switch on the light to have a better aim at the dart board.

You get better at Risk Assessment and understanding the right thing™ to do as you gain experience and see/suffer failures. You start to develop an idea of what works and what doesn’t. This fine-tunes your Bullshit-meter so once you read someone trying to shill you crypto by “bro, this shitcoin is going to the moon bro”, you immediately know to make a better decision and promptly show them where they can shove their blockchain wayy up.

fig 3. Some Bank man. Fried.

Conclusion

There is no right thing. Only decisions. You pick one, and you work hard to make them right. If you keep making them fast enough and have a continuous feedback loop of learning from them, one day you’ll simply have so many hits, all the darts that didn’t stick wouldn’t matter anymore.

Remember, there is no spoon.