for tomorrow

Everyone is prioritizing at every moment, it's impossible not to. On paper, we prioritize by taking into account a variety of factors to aggregate the “expected value” of doing something, and then naturally just choose what gives us the “most bang for our buck.” But in reality, prioritization is really, really hard. Most of my life, I avoided the difficulties of prioritization by doing things which have clear reward pathways, like olympiads or research in high school. This is not to say that I didn’t take risks, doing olympiads is a massive risk, most people don’t make it far. But, the decisions I took were calculated, and the time I spent doing different things was carefully measured. This only worked because there was a clear reward.  Fast forward to this blog post . I’d achieved almost everything I’ve wanted to do with olympiads, and was trying to find the passion and motivation to move forward. This was just a problem of prioritization. Outside the contained world of high schoo...