Does maximizing options maximize empowerment? I've found I feel much more empowered in a situation where I've already deeply committed to some specific thing than when I have dozens of options but haven't chosen one. Intentionally closing the door on thousands of options is actually the only path I've found that's made it possible for me to grow at all. If I maximize options, I can just escape when faced with a growth opportunity, not actually have to grow through it.
I remember sitting up late one night in my twenties overwhelmed by the sheer number of doors I would never open. Not metaphorical doors--actual, physical doors to physical buildings and rooms. It had hit me earlier that day that the number of doors I would even encounter in my life is infinitesimal compared to the total number of doors, and the ones I would open of that tiny subset were orders of magnitude smaller still.
I suppose I could have responded to this by making some strange life rule where I always try the handle on every door, but I think I grew a lot more by deciding it doesn't matter, that opening all the doors, or even maximizing my chances to open doors, would be a waste of my life. So I guess they doubled as metaphorical doors after all.
I don't know how measurable it would be, but I would rather measure my personal growth by the peace I've managed to find with the realities I can't change and the choices I've made. For instance, I'm not infinite. I'm going to die. There will be things I dislike about the world that won't change during my lifetime. Stuff like that. That seems like a better measure to me of how much I'm growing.
I think it's not so much as having many options but more so of having a lot of backup plans for when things eventually go wrong. There's analysis paralysis after all. It would be better to say that empowerment is maximized when there is a definitively best choice and there are several good backup choices (complete with sensible rankings down the chain of backups, ideally definitive) if the original choice suddenly becomes unavailable due to the arbitrariness of life.
Hmm. I actually still find I'm subjectively freer when I can peacefully face the reality in front of me, even when it's not something I would want.
My mom is a good example to me. The first time she got diagnosed with cancer (12 years ago), she had option option option. There was everything to try, but it was all fraught with the pressure of making the wrong choice, or messing something up, or not knowing.
This time, after she'd been cancer-free for 12 years and got diagnosed with a whole different cancer, it's been so different. She'll either beat it or she won't. Anything that's tried will either work or it won't. It will suck either a little or a lot, until it doesn't anymore, for one reason or another. She's subjectively freer now because she's not trying to get out of the "bad" options. They're just coming and she's just going through them.
She seems a lot more empowered this go-round.
You know that part of the Serenity Prayer, about "the wisdom to know the difference"? I feel more empowered when I don't try to judge that with a razor's margin. When I stop thinking, "Maybe, if I just try hard enough or in exactly the right way, this could be 'something I can change,'" and recognize how small my impact actually is on anything but my own life and the lives of the people very closest to me, the more empowered I feel.
Knowing when to optimize for optionality and when to burn the boats is key. Some things in life improve markedly when you let go of optionality and instead lean in to the constraint: significant relationships, jobs, parenting. Everyone's disposition biases them toward one side or the other.
Recognizing when each approach is useful, and being able to do it (even poorly) is a great skill.
Letting go of optionality is a good thing when you have a safety net to fall back on. If you don't have one, the next best thing is to have various escape hatches available.
I've also found that sometimes, to maximize options, I have to first commit to an option. I've had situations before where I deliberated too long and missed the opportunity altogether.
You are confusing words. In the context of the OP, "having many options" doesn't mean indiscriminately hoarding everything. It's like making choices in chess that result in having more options for moving pieces. The "premature optimization is the root of all evil" saying is an even more lacking analogy, but it conveys a similar idea. In other words, the advice to increase your options applies even if you dedicate your entire life to just one thing.
While I agree in general with much of this post, there are a few other things I'd keep in mind:
* If you always focus on growth, sometimes you focus less on maintaining what you already have. It tends to be the case that when you're really growing on some things, you're sometimes neglecting other things.
* I like to keep a small allocation of my time/energy to growth, but most of it on maintenance because I want to keep much of the good things I already have. Obviously this allocation varies by individual (based on your goals/desires/energy/time)
* Focusing on maximal optionality can be good, but of course an option is only useful when exercised. Collecting options is just a cost (premiums paid). At some point you need to truncate the options (let them expire/have doors close) and exercise/execute on a select few
> Not everything that can be counted counts. Not everything that counts can be counted.
Like any good maxim, the original author is lost to time. But this [1] traces it to:
> It would be nice if all of the data which sociologists require could be enumerated because then we could run them through IBM machines and draw charts as the economists do. However, not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.
Which is from William Bruce Cameron's 1963 text “Informal Sociology: A Casual Introduction to Sociological Thinking.”
I strongly dislike the productivity-maximizing ethos that drives people to quantify and optimize every aspect of their lives. The author acknowledges that POV. But at its worst, it’s both pernicious and privileged.
"Indulgent" might better capture what I think OP is describing than "privileged." There is a certain navel-gazing quality to endlessly pushing for higher personal records past the point where they particularly even benefit you, especially when some of that attention might be spent helping other people.
And while that can be true, I think it only applies once you do really have your life together. Most of us, growing up, had lots of areas where we really struggled, hurting both ourselves and others, and it WAS important for us to reflect on those areas and consciously try to improve. I think it's only indulgent when done well past the point of need.
Privilege is partly about autonomy. If most of my problems are outside my near-term control—my family, my neighborhood, my medical situation—I have low autonomy, at least in the moment. And that makes everything much harder. If you want to see a ruthless maximizer, go watch a poor person feed their kid for the last three days of the month.
If all of that is sorted, I can now turn to applying my maximizing attention to my inbox or my personal health score or my friend-influence index or my standing deadlift or whatever else.
Nice post. With respect to maximizing future options, I find the ideas expressed in the following quotes are interesting counter-points.
From '4,000 weeks': "Not only should you settle; ideally you should settle in a way that makes it harder to back out, such as moving in together, or having a child. The irony of all our efforts to avoid facing finitude -- to carry on believing that it might be possible not to choose between mutually exclusive options -- is that when people finally do choose, in a relatively irreversible way, they're usually much happier as a result."
From 'Zero to One': "When people lack concrete plans to carry out, they use formal rules to assemble a portfolio of various options. ... A definite view, by contrast, favors firm convictions. Instead of pursuing many-sided mediocrity and calling it "well-roundedness," a definite person determines the one best thing to do and then does it."
I like this blog post, and like other commenters I agree. It's also interesting that it doesn't so much distinguish between external and internal 'achievement' so much.
For a very different take on the topic... I too was interested in the question of "measuring personal growth." So much so that I enrolled in graduate school and am now getting a Ph.D. researching personality development / change in "individual differences" over time. Another way to conceptualize / measure personal growth could be via decreases in one's level of Neuroticism over time.
What about kids? They don't seem to start with any neuroticism until they learn it or maybe the more neurotic parts of the brain start to mature/engage
Good question. We typically don't think of young kids as having neuroticism so much as an aspect of temperament we call "negative emotionality." Some children seem to have more of it than others. Taken at a slice in time, roughly half of the between-person personality variation on a given trait can be attributed to genes, the other half is environmental. (Strictly speaking, this doesn't quite account for variation in the change of traits over time though.)
Also, there's a well-studied effect where adolescents typically experience decreases in neuroticism / negative emotionality as they change and mature as they move into young adulthood.
> A friend I’ve met through my Discord, Denys, told me that his friend has this theory that every few years, half of your dreams die. People give up on their dreams because they realize that they can no longer achieve them.
> I disagree. As I grow older, I have more dreams. I now know many things that I didn’t know before, and I have access to more resources than I ever did. This allows me to do things that I used to think of as impossible.
I sympathize with the friend. A significant life-altering event such as chronic illness, death of a loved one, NDE, etc can definitely recalibrate one's perspective in life and the trajectory one wants to follow or what one defines as personal growth. Sometimes it does involve halving the number of paths (i.e. due to a physical disability). If the author has gone through such hurdles and still been able to remain steadfast optimistic, that is indeed inspiring--more power to them, but the reality for a lot of people out there can be much less rosy.
> I now know many things that I didn’t know before, and I have access to more resources than I ever did.
Those are also measurable axes.
My single-bit ADC: if things that used to be stretches for me are now easy, and things that used to be impossible are now stretches, I'm still growing.
(I pushed strength and reflexes earlier in life; those areas are now no longer an option but on the other hand I've learned how to steadily progress in disciplines where one may take years to work through plateaus)
This post is about personal growth in-the-large (or, strategy). I think that the other side to this--which is equally important--is personal growth in-the-small (or, tactics).
What I mean by personal growth in-the-small is something like Atomic Habits. Iterating on your habits to increase your effectiveness in the day-to-day opens up time and energy that can then be spent on the larger goals.
I really like the post, and just want to point out that this + Atomic Habits would be a good pairing!
The greatest kind of growth isn’t any of these three metrics she mentions.
It is wisdom and self-mastery: the ability to know what is right and wrong, the control to continually transform yourself, bit by bit, something that makes everything around you better.
These things she talks about are fine, but in the best lived life, they merely follow from the first.
A decade each feels much too conservative for the things on Quynh's list, but I like the list itself as an anchoring point for what would make a content life for a great many people. Myself included, because I'm following it successfully!
> Quynh, an old friend who runs a publishing house in Vietnam, believes that there are three big problems in life: career, family, and finance. It usually takes people a decade to figure each out.
I have a really hard time relating to this (except if you frame problem as "something to be solved somehow"). I'm much more focused on solving the problems of: finding activities that are worth living for (programming, drawing, music, reading, writing, sports, nature) and friendships and intellectual exchange.
I find myself growing as I am able to focus my attention on these topics and feel that I am doing so in a sustainable way, and feel content (almost) every day.
I remember sitting up late one night in my twenties overwhelmed by the sheer number of doors I would never open. Not metaphorical doors--actual, physical doors to physical buildings and rooms. It had hit me earlier that day that the number of doors I would even encounter in my life is infinitesimal compared to the total number of doors, and the ones I would open of that tiny subset were orders of magnitude smaller still.
I suppose I could have responded to this by making some strange life rule where I always try the handle on every door, but I think I grew a lot more by deciding it doesn't matter, that opening all the doors, or even maximizing my chances to open doors, would be a waste of my life. So I guess they doubled as metaphorical doors after all.
I don't know how measurable it would be, but I would rather measure my personal growth by the peace I've managed to find with the realities I can't change and the choices I've made. For instance, I'm not infinite. I'm going to die. There will be things I dislike about the world that won't change during my lifetime. Stuff like that. That seems like a better measure to me of how much I'm growing.