Over the last 2 years, I’ve helped hundreds of people think through their next career moves.
From transitioning military veterans debating whether to go back to school or enter the workforce to executives considering the next career move.
Over the last 4 years, I’ve faced similar decisions -
Am I doing the right things to grow my businesses?
Should I continue with the current course of action or try something new?
Is XYZ tactic working, or should I invest my time elsewhere?
I’ve come to a simple but meaningful conclusion - the career anxiety we often feel occurs most acutely at decision points.
I never feel stressed about execution, ONLY about weighing decisions.
Why?
It feels like major decisions work in one direction - once we make a decision, doors close to us. Thankfully, that’s only partially true. I love this graphic courtesy of Tim Urban -
This and next week’s posts are about making big career decisions with limited information. We’ll cover -
When decision points arise
How to gather intelligence
The Dunning Kruger Effect and how to be self aware about how confident we should be in a decision
Helpful tools and frameworks to make big decisions (next week)
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Decision Points
Decision points occur when we’re presented with an opportunity that we believe will alter the direction of our lives.
Unfortunately, these points are characterized by ambiguity.
When we face an opportunity to pivot from one endeavor to another, we’re forced to make predictions, including -
Will this new work be meaningful/impactful?
Will it provide better economic opportunities?
Will I like the work?
Will I like the team?
Without a crystal ball, we’re ultimately making decisions with incomplete information - our goal is to gather enough information, then decide and execute.
Phase I: Gathering Intelligence
Whenever a new opportunity presents itself, the first order of business is to gather relevant information.
This phase is often the most challenging part of making big decisions for a few reasons -
Gathering too little information is a problem because we’re left to make a decision from a position of ignorance.
Gathering too much information makes it difficult to parse through and prioritize the tidbits of info that will affect the outcomes we are working to predict.
Separating the signal (relevant information) from the noise (extraneous, non-essential information) is incredibly challenging.
Deciding between conflicting advice/information is stressful and challenging.
Doing so in a timely manner is extremely difficult.
Ideally, we want to gather enough information to enable us to make a decision, but not too much information that clouds our ability to decide and act.
There is a research study that I often think about when it comes to information and our confidence in the decisions that we make -
The Dunning-Kruger Effect
The Dunning-Kruger effect describes how much we know about a given topic and our level of confidence.
This graphic attempts to visually display how confident we are in a given topic relative to our knowledge on the topic. I’ll illustrate an example using a topic I know very little about, Physics -
When I was in high school and had yet to take a physics course, I lived in the lower left part of the graph - my knowledge of physics was 0 and my confidence in my knowledge was also 0.
After a high school Physics class and another year of studying Physics at Navy, my confidence shot up, but my competence was still relatively low. This is known as the Peak of Mount Stupid. On the Peak of Mount Stupid, we don’t know enough about a topic, but have confidence in our knowledge. THIS IS THE MOST DANGEROUS PLACE FROM WHICH TO MAKE DECISIONS.
As I learned more about physics, my confidence was thankfully shattered - people spend entire careers studying a niche domain in physics, barely scratching the surface.
As our level of knowledge rises to near guru status, our confidence goes back up.
In decision-making, self-awareness and an understanding of Dunning-Kruger can help us understand how accurate our level of conviction should be.
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