Prioritize Risks

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 school, there's almost an infinite number of things to explore. But with this vast opportunity comes the price of opportunity cost. Iterating on one project means you don’t spend time on another. And everything you want to do seems simultaneously promising but not guaranteed. So how do you prioritize? When there isn’t a clear reward, how do you assign value to everything you're doing?

I think the answer is simple: work instead of prioritizing. Obviously, doing something is better than doing nothing, so “just do it.” Be in the driver’s seat of your brain, and suppress the part that wants to stop and rest at every difficult decision. Because just trying something out is more useful than deciding whether to try something out.

Well, it isn’t this simple. The reason most people can’t do this is because they’re used to high priority workloads. Deadlines and progress fuel adrenaline which makes it clear what the next priority should be. But when you take this away, you seem to have nothing to do, even when there’s so many things you want to try. What kept you going was the perceived value. Take that away and there’s no reason to try anything else. It’s hard to shift your view of “priority.”

A simple solution is to keep an endless todo list. When you’re bored, just pick up something you’ve always wanted to do from it. The hardest part is finding the motivation to do the seemingly “useless” things. To find that motivation, start thinking about this as being a “side quest.” You don’t have to be the best at it, nor do you have to finish it. Just have fun.

This post was initially about taking risks, i.e. doing things that don’t have clear rewards. A lot of people, me included, are stuck prioritizing and don’t even get there. But prioritization and risk-taking go hand-in-hand. The most successful people finish everything they need to get done, and then still have the motivation go crazy.