Holding to your options for dear life

In 1941 Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges wrote the short story "The Garden of Forking Paths", where a Chinese civil servant sets on a quest to write a very intricate novel that, in the end, turns out to be tantamount to an ever-forking labyrinth where any human is bound to lose his way, probably along the lines of the "Choose Your Own Adventure" series that I mentioned two weeks ago, but with a much more fiendish twist, because the infinite branching does not allow the explorer to achieve any meaningful progress.

Life can be at times a little bit like that, particularly in modern times, when digital technologies and globalization have coalesced to provide a range of options that is simply overwhelming. Considering twice as many options typically costs twice the effort and with the increased number of options the differences among them become harder and harder to judge it is just normal that we end up evaluating only a very limited set of options and picking among them, just to make the task manageable both in time and effort.

Photo: Roger Karlsson

For life-changing decisions, however, the situation is very different: while choosing to have onion or not on your sandwich is almost irrelevant in the long term and only aims to maximize the immediate amount of pleasure, the cost of making the wrong call in your university major, the acceptance of a job offer or moving to another city can be very high. You might end up without a professional future, in a job that you do not like or simply surrounded by neighbors that have nothing in common with you and only make your life miserable. And the perception is that any disappointing or frustrating result would be your fault alone, since you made the call. This is the reason why many people choose to drift by in the river of life, often taking the common sense choice so as to have an alibi if anything goes wrong: it was just "natural" to pick what they picked.

The other frequent response is simply keeping your options as open as possible and for as long as you can. If one option leads you unavoidably down a very particular path but the other promises to offer you still a number of options the safe approach (as in "avoiding to make a fool of yourself") is to pick the latter one. The problem, as writer Mike Sholars points out in this article, is that the constant fear of committing yourself to something is likely to eventually make you pass on options that could literally make you the happiest person alive.

It is not that having options is a bad thing, quite the contrary. I mentioned last week that most of the time the only way to make an informed is by giving it a try: if you have not been in contract with scientists you might not even know that this kind of life can be attractive to you. In that sense the contribution of the parents as providers of opportunities for the children is an essential one: there are many things that can spark an anecdotal interest, but once you get to try it you end up saying "yes, it is nice, but I do not see myself doing this for the next ten years", so that you can cross out that option quite easily.

Sholar's article provided a very nice description of something I had been rummaging about but had not managed to nail: once you make a decision you stop looking at the pros and cons and just get your game together to move forward trying not to look too much at the potential downsides of the choice you have made. It is just like writing a story including three random words: impossible to pick the best three random words, but once you have them the task is quite manageable. Keeping your options open, on the other hand, forces you to repeatedly evaluate each of the options, which is not a very tiring mental exercise, but also emotionally taxing since you will be putting yourself mentally in each of the situations and experiencing the downside of all the options.

When if 2008 Canadian author Malcolm Gladwell (oops, it is the second day in a row I mention him, I should probably have the doctor look at it) published "Outliers" he introduced the 10000-hour rule based on his observation that among people with a world-class level in their trade that was the average time they had spent practicing. Many people read the ruled wrongly, interpreted that it was enough to accumulate 10000 hours of practice to become a master, through themselves into clocking time as madmen and ended up very tired but far from the mastery level they intended to achieve.

I bring up this idea today because it is undoubtedly true is that any craft that one might pursue will typically require that amount of time master (plus some talent, the right type of support from experts and many more things), so it is essential that the option we choose does not set us on a 10000-hour long path across the desert. Committing yourself to any task that inspires you will make the way ahead much easier and success much more likely. So if you are keeping your options open as if your life depended on them, think again because you might be passing on your real calling. Have a nice week.