Transcriber: Thảo Vương Phương Reviewer: Annet Johnson
“Do what makes you happy.”
I think that’s misleading advice.
My name is Neil.
I was amongst the first students
at Dhirubhai Ambani International School more than 15 years ago.
And, today, I want to share some tools I’ve learned recently
to help you make better decisions over the next few years.
So why was that misleading advice?
Well, think about the last time you got something that you’d been waiting for,
like a new phone or a new gaming console.
You were probably pretty excited the day you got it, right?
Well, are you as excited about it today?
If you got a new one of those phones or consoles today,
would you be just as excited as the last time?
Probably not, because of the hedonic treadmill,
which says that each of us has a permanent baseline level of happiness.
Let’s say I’m usually at happiness level 50.
When I get a full scholarship to college,
I'm super excited and I get a bump in happiness to 80,
but that bump is brief and I quickly get used to it.
One of my first performance reviews after I started my first job,
I got a really weak rating and I got a brief drop in happiness down to 20.
But this too eventually reverted back to the baseline.
So stop saying I will be happy when I get this or I accomplish that
because that happiness will likely be temporary,
but your expectations for your next goal will rise up permanently.
It’s still okay to enjoy some hedonic pleasures,
just don’t expect them to permanently shift your baseline.
There are, however, three things that permanently shift your baseline:
one, expressing gratitude;
two, building supportive relationships;
and three, acts of service.
So as you’re picking your subjects, your college majors, your career,
think about the choices where you’ll work with people that inspire you.
You will help society around you
and you’ll feel grateful for the life that you lead.
Personally, instead of optimizing for happiness,
I choose to optimize for interestingness.
When given a choice between a familiar, comfortable option
and a new, interesting one, I’d often pick the latter.
For example, after college, I could have immediately chosen a high-paying job,
typical at a prestigious tech company.
But instead, I chose to try startups for a year.
I lived super cheaply.
I taught coding to business executives one day a month to pay my bills
and spent the rest of the month
exploring and testing startup ideas that interested me.
I didn’t have any of the material comforts I have today,
but it was a super interesting time for me.
Similarly, when I was in college and could do internships,
I could have chosen internships that were at those tech companies, very comfortable.
But I used that time to try out other careers
that I thought might not interest me but were worth checking out,
like working in a bank.
So that’s the first tool for better decision-making.
Choose what you want to optimize for
instead of something as fleeting as happiness.
The second tool I learned is for building expertise.
Turns out, that's really hard.
You may have heard that to master a skill, you need 10,000 hours of practice in it.
To be the top five percent in the world at something requires even more sacrifice.
When I was in school, I thought,
maybe I want to be one of the best computer scientists in the world.
But then I realized the trade-offs that came with that:
social life, sports, and even sleep.
So today I think I have an easier way.
I’m a product manager of a team at Google
that fights climate change using artificial intelligence.
My team consists of researchers from DeepMind.
I don’t know if they’re in the top 5% of the AI researchers in the world,
but they’re at least in the top 25%.
And, similarly, they’re probably not in the top 5% of people
working on climate change projects, but still probably in the top 25%.
However, when you look at the intersection of those two skills,
teams that have expertise in both AI and climate change,
you multiply those two 25% numbers together
and that puts us in the top 5%.
That allows us to accomplish goals that we previously thought of as impossible.
Now, this won’t just work with any combination of two skills;
you do need to ensure that there is some value at the intersection of those two.
But we’re more and more often today seeing interdisciplinary work become important,
especially the examples I see are between tech plus something else:
so lawyers that can code, doctors that understand AI,
food tech, video tech, and the list goes on.
Also try to ensure that at least one of the skills is high leverage.
Most careers you create value by using your own time.
My parents are doctors
and they create immense value when they spend time with patients.
But with only so many hours in a day,
there are only so many patients they can see,
putting a limit on the amount of impact that they can have in a day.
Meanwhile, a classmate of mine from DAIS started a YouTube channel
giving fitness and health advice online to millions of young Indians.
This channel is making an impact even while he's asleep.
So pick a skill with high leverage such as technology or mass media.
That’s the second tool for better decision-making.
If you want to be the foremost expert of something,
pick two topics that you can get really good at,
especially if they’re high leverage you can have high impact.
I’ll leave you with one more tool today.
Don’t overestimate the impact of your decisions.
When I was at DAIS, you constantly heard about which country, which college,
which major the other classmates were choosing for further studies.
And with that constant exposure, it felt like these were massive decisions
that would forever alter the course of our lives.
I didn’t get into my dream college.
I chose to study in the UK,
which I hadn’t even seriously considered before admission.
And I got rejected by my current job two times before I got it,
but it worked out fine.
Today, I’m doing meaningful and fulfilling work,
I’m living in Silicon Valley,
and I have a tight group of friends that inspire me.
And when I look back at my classmates from DAIS,
one did go to that dream college of mine, another one majored in material science,
a third one went to business school,
and today all of them have ended up in similar tech careers as me
in the Bay Area.
All of that is to say that many decisions that feel life or death today,
you will look back on as minor in the grand scheme of things, in retrospect,
and you will see many alternative paths to reaching the same goal.
Also, many decisions are just reversible.
One of the things that launched recently
was an improved version of Gmail search with new filters.
The team had been working on it for years.
But the vice-president would keep having new ideas
for how something should look or behave differently,
so the team never shipped the feature.
When I joined the team, I encouraged them to ship it “as is.”
I knew that some of those experiments being suggested could always be run later.
We could make those changes after the feature was live
and see whether users engaged with them in which case we would keep the changes
or reduced their engagement in which case we’d maybe roll them back.
That’s the beauty of software, you can reverse those kinds of changes.
So that’s the third tool,
learn to recognize which decisions are reversible,
which decisions have multiple paths to the same goal,
and don't spend too long agonizing over those.
You’re better off looking at the data available at the time,
making the best decision you can with that information and moving forward.
So to recap, the three tools of better decision-making.
One, choose what you want to optimize for in life
and maybe that’s not something as fleeting as happiness.
Two, if you want to be really the world’s best at something,
pick two skills that you can be pretty good at
and be the expert at the intersection of those two.
Try to try to pick skills that are high leverage to maximize your impact.
And three, learn to recognize
which decisions are worthy of long, hard deliberation and which ones are not.
With that, I wish you an interesting life.