How to choose between competing opportunities
Summary: How do you pick the best option for you? What should you do if they seem equally compelling? This issue offers a few ideas to help you pick the opportunity (e.g., job, project) that’s the best fit for you.
(~4 min read)
#1. Increase your luck
Lauren McCann and Gabriel Weinberg write in their book Super Thinking that you can boost your chances of success in an uncertain future by systematically increasing your luck.
The playing field
McCann and Weinberg note that the economy, like many global systems, is a chaotic system. With chaotic systems, you can guess which way they’re trending, but it’s impossible to precisely predict their overall long-term state. For example, you can’t know how a certain company or person in the economy will fare over time.
A key feature of chaotic systems like the economy is that they are sensitive to changes in initial conditions.
As McCann and Weinberg point out, this phenomenon is explained by a metaphor called the butterfly effect: “the path of a tornado could be affected by a butterfly flapping its wings weeks before, sending air particles on a slightly different path than they would have otherwise traveled, which then gets amplified over time and ultimately results in a different path for the tornado.”
You can probably point to times in your life when a small change led to a big effect by asking “What if?”
What if you hadn’t gone to the event that led to meeting your significant other?
What if you had formed a relationship with a different mentor or teacher?
Once you understand the butterfly effect, you can use it to your advantage.
Increasing your odds of success
Unlike an air particle, you have some control over your life. You have the potential to increase the probability of a successful outcome for yourself.
To do this, McCann and Weinberg recommend that you increase your “luck surface area.”
You may remember from geometry that the surface area of an object is how much area the surface of that object covers. Just as it’s easier to catch a fish if you cast a wide net, your personal luck surface area will increase as you interact with more people in more diverse situations.
You can increase your luck surface area by relaxing your rules for how you engage with the world. Keeping the butterfly effect in mind, you are increasing your chances of influencing a tornado – in this case, maybe it’s forming a new partnership that turns into a positive outcome.
But you have to be judicious about which events you attend. If you say yes to everything, then you won’t have enough time for focused work.
On the other hand, saying no to everything will reduce your luck surface area too much.
A happy medium would be to occasionally attend events that expose you to people who can help you advance your goals: “Say no often, so you can say yes when you might make some new meaningful connections.”
#2. Do it only if you really care
Author and entrepreneur Derek Sivers writes on his blog that when you feel over-committed and scattered, you should use the “Hell yeah!” or “No” rule to decide how to spend your time.
For each event you’re invited to and every request to start a new project, if your reaction isn’t “Hell yeah!” then just say “No.”
When you say “No” to most things, you leave room in your life to dedicate yourself to the stuff that you really want to do – that rare commitment that makes you say “Hell Yeah!”
As Sivers notes, we’re all busy and in many cases have taken on too much: “Saying yes to less is the way out.”
#3. The number 7 isn't always lucky
Athlete and author Kyle Maynard says in an interview that the big shift in his approach to evaluating opportunities came after listening to a successful CEO describe his company’s hiring philosophy.
“When his company grew and he ran out of time to interview people himself, he had his employees rate new candidates on a 1-10 scale. The only stipulation was they couldn’t choose 7.”
For Maynard, hearing this made him realize how many invitations he’d received that he would rate 7. If he thought a coffee date, meeting, or speech invitation was a 7, then there was a good chance he felt obligated to do it.
Which is why removing the 7 ranking is so useful.
As Maynard puts it: “if I have to decide between a 6 or an 8, it’s a lot easier to quickly determine whether or not I should even consider it.”
Quote of the week
“You can do anything—but not everything.”
- Productivity expert David Allen in an interview with Fast Company