My grandparents are mathematicians. For most of my childhood, until I left for college, I had the duty to be among the best math student in my class, which most of the time I was.
One of the most important things that mathematics teaches us and that is useful in our daily lives is how to solve an equation with several unknowns. Adult life is complex and becoming a responsible individual means taking responsibility for making decisions without having all the cards in hand.
I have a friend who recently told me about an equation that she couldn’t solve. She has a startup idea that she wants to work on with a group of alumni from her college but it is in a domain in which she has no previous experience.
“I have a few opportunities to work for interesting companies, but I also have this opportunity to be a co-founder of an incredible startup,” she said. “But the startups’ life is so full of uncertainties. When I speak with entrepreneurs, it seems to me that this is a really precarious career path. How can I know if choosing my startup idea is the right choice?”
I replied that she can’t know for sure. My time as a startup founder was one of the most uncertain times of my life. And I also told her about Schrödinger’s cat.
In 1935, Erwin Schrödinger by trying to explain the Copenhague school of quantum physic proposed an experiment which is known as The Schrödinger’s Cat Paradox. In simple terms, Schrödinger stated that if you place a cat and something that could kill the cat (a radioactive atom) in a box and sealed it, you would not know if the cat was dead or alive until you opened the box so that until the box was opened, the cat was (in a sense) both “dead and alive”.
Just like Schrödinger’s cat, my friend choosing to follow her startup idea rather than taking a corporate job can be both a good and bad decision, only by opening the box will she know. She has to accept that level of uncertainty when she will make her choice.
But few people know how to fully assume their decisions. I’ve been fighting with this for a long time myself. I have never been the type to blame others for my actions, but I used to run away from situations that asked me to have my own opinion if, when I analyzed a situation, there were too many unknown variables. But the reality is that I will never know for sure anything and never will you. Opinions, like life decisions, must be taken with the information currently available and will evolve as you get more information, which is normal. Only fools never changed their minds.
A good way to not fool yourself is to use heuristics. This is another mathematical concept that I have found useful to hack my self-doubts. A heuristic is a problem solving or self-discovery approach that employs a practical method that is not guaranteed to be optimal, perfect, or rational, but which is nevertheless sufficient for reaching an immediate, short-term goal. Like taking a professional life-changing decision. Where finding an optimal solution is impossible or impractical, heuristic methods can be used to speed up the process of finding a satisfactory solution.
To go back to my friend's case, we sat down and I showed her what was the heuristics I was basing my decision on for my job search.
H1- I want to do work that makes me feel useful. H2- I must be in an environment where I can learn a lot and touch on different types of projects while being more or less supervised. H3- I care about the growth opportunity of my career. H4- My work environment matters a lot to me. Therefore, the company culture is something I pay attention to. And, H5- I want to have a > or = good enough salary (in $ it must match what I could have made if I was still working as a chemical engineer and in FCFA I should be able to more or less sustain my lifestyle in Abidjan).
Today, my professional heuristics ignore other variables such as the geographic position or the leadership level of my role. The fact is, these are variables that I’m not currently interested in. I also know that I probably left out other very important parameters in my analysis. And as I grow, the more I know and the more experience I get, the more likely these heuristics will change for the better. They already changed a lot these past two years.
It seemed easier for me to deal with uncertainty when I know clearly what was the pieces of information available and reasons that influenced my choices at the time I had to make my decision. I can turn down opportunities that don’t align with my present heuristics and even if later it turns out that they were great shots, it will not stop me to sleep well at night.
Moreover, it is important to note your reasons somewhere where you can read them years later if your memory fails you.
It can be hard to determine what matters to you and to do so it requires a certain level of introspection. So I bet it would help a lot of people to ask themselves about this explicitly. What are the unknown variables with which you can deal and what are the variables on which you can base your choices?
