High-standards satisficer

How do you efficiently make the best choices? I call my method of making excellent choices being a high-standards satisficer.

When making choices, you can either be a maximizer or a satisficer:

• Maximizers try to find the best potential choice
• Satisficers define criteria and try to fulfill it

Barry Schwartz's famous The Paradox of Choice talks about the impact of being a maximizer or satisficer to our well-being, particularly in a world of with more and more choices.

But what about optimizing the impact of being a maximizer or satisficer to the actual quality of our choices? That's where being a high-standards satisficer comes in.

And to be a high-standards satisficer, you must be competent enough to create choice opportunities and to define and evaluate those high standards with incomplete information.

Barry Schwartz loses it while buying jeans

In The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz starts telling a story of him buying jeans to illustrate how we're "tyrannized by choice" (his words).

“I want a pair of jeans—32–28,” I said.

“Do you want them slim fit, easy fit, relaxed fit, baggy, or extra baggy?” she replied. “Do you want them stonewashed, acid-washed, or distressed? Do you want them button-fly or zipper-fly? Do you want them faded or regular?”

I was stunned. [..] I went back to her and asked what difference there was between regular jeans, relaxed fit, and easy fit. She referred me to a diagram that showed how the different cuts varied. It didn’t help narrow the choice, so I decided to try them all. [..]

I was now convinced that one of these options had to be right for me, and I was determined to figure it out. But I couldn’t. Finally, I chose the easy fit [..]

Schwartz, Barry. The Paradox of Choice (p. 1). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

As someone who also hates buying clothes, I can relate to the author's nightmarish experience buying jeans.

But there's one thing I'm sure about Barry: the guy doesn't know jack about jeans. (Neither do I, by the way)

When we're incompetent, anything that isn't flat-out obvious is overwhelming.

When you're starting to learn to play the electric guitar and going to buy your first instrument, there's a reason why the most common advice is "take a friend who plays the guitar with you." Your "tastes" for a guitar don't really matter because you don't yet know how to play – you can't yet tell good from bad.

At most, you can find a guitar that has a color you like.

While The Paradox of Choice is a good book and rightfully tackles the problem of satisfaction and contentment with decisions in a world with ever-increasing choices, I wanna talk about a different challenge:

Given all the choices you had, how good was the decision you made? Not how happy you felt about it. I'm asking about how good a decision it was.

How good did Barry Schwartz look in those jeans, after all?

Barry Schwartz's conclusion to the jeans odyssey doesn't sound very promising:

Finally, I chose the easy fit, because “relaxed fit” implied that I was getting soft in the middle and needed to cover it up.

Schwartz, Barry. The Paradox of Choice (p. 2). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Yikes. If I were to bet, I'd bet that despite his whole day of pants-shuffling, those jeans don't look very good on him.

Now, you may rightfully ask: "Dui, why are we talking about how good a guy looks or doesn't look in jeans in an article about leadership?"

Because, both in your personal life and at work, you make very consequential choices. And not always the quality of those choices is directly correlated to your satisfaction with them.

So.. are you trying to feel great?

Or to do great?

This is about doing great.

And to talk about doing great, I'm gonna teach you how to hire the best secretary.

Seriously.

How to hire the best secretary. Seriously.

In math, there's an area of study called the optimal stopping theory and a famous allegory called the secretary problem. It tries to find the optimal answer to this question:

Assuming you have X secretaries to interview and you can rank them against each other, what's the optimal hiring strategy to hire the best one?

The challenge this tries to optimize for is that, if you interview too few secretaries, you risk losing the best one because they're still in the pool, but if you interview too many, you risk having already passed by the best one and never finding somebody as good again.

Got it? Good.

What's funny about the secretary problem is that there's a mathematically provable way to optimize your secretary hiring:

• Interview exactly 37% of the candidate pool at random, and reject them all (no cheating!)
• Define "the bar" at the rank of the best one you've interviewed so far
• Hire whoever passes that bar

This is known as the 37% rule, a way to set the standards such that it maximizes your chances of hiring the best person.

What's interesting about the 37% rule is that, in one of those curious mathematical coincidences, your chances of hiring the best person using this strategy is also (only) 37%. It's also provably the optimal strategy, which is quite humbling.

There are many variations to the secretary problem that make it more realistic:

• Can they reject your offer?
• Can you go back on a decision?
• Can you cardinally (rather than ordinally) measure their performance?
• How much does it cost to interview each secretary?

Many of these variations can change your odds of success. The 37% rule is a no information strategy, and typically you have some information about what you're trying to do.

One of the ways to increase your odds of success in a realistic setting is to correctly set your bar before interviewing the secretaries.

If your bar is set too high, you're likely to reject the best candidate (and never find anybody else again), and if it's set too low, you're likely to hire a bad secretary.

But if your bar is set just right, you'll both increase your odds of success and spend less time and money interviewing.

OK, enough metaphors. What does that look like in practice?

Building amazing top of pipeline

The 37% rule applies to any group: you optimize finding the best choice no matter whether you have a pool of bad or of great choices.

But, if you care about results, it really doesn't matter that you're finding the best choice of a bad pool. It's much better to find a top-percentile choice in a great pool.

Another interesting mathematical property of this problem is that the bigger the pool, the lower your actual odds of finding the best person. I won't show you the math, but basically, the odds converge from 50% (2 people in the pool) to 37% (infinite people) the more people you add.

Most times, when "your bar is too high" and you haven't found anybody, the problem is instead that you're not strong enough at building choice opportunities – top of the pipeline.

If you were looking for a job, and you found the best job out of a pool of terrible opportunities, then you're still stuck at a terrible job.

Great selection ability only matters once you've built amazing top of pipeline. And counter-intuitively (but also obviously), the smaller your pool of great opportunities, the better your odds of choosing the best option.

That's one reason why immigrants move to America, the "Land of Opportunity." – the opportunities are so financially superior to other countries that even bad choices from the American pool are great in comparison to the best opportunities in our native country.

In Netflix CEO Reed Hastings' No Rules Rules, they introduce a term I really like to talk about the caliber of their employees: Talent Density.

We learned that a company with really dense talent is a company everyone wants to work for. High performers especially thrive in environments where the overall talent density is high.

Our employees were learning more from one another and teams were accomplishing more — faster. This was increasing individual motivation and satisfaction and leading the entire company to get more done. We found that being surrounded by the best catapulted already good work to a whole new level.

Hastings, Reed; Meyer, Erin. No Rules Rules (p. 7). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Similarly, you need a measure of your choice pool's density for whatever criteria you're optimizing for – and the higher this density, the better choices you'll make.

If you don't have a really curated and carefully created top of pipeline, and you're not especially competent at doing it, the odds are you won't make great decisions.

But once you have a great top of pipeline, you're not done yet.

Most high-stakes choices, at work and in life, require you to define standards and evaluate choices with missing information.

Do you know enough to have high standards?

Many years ago, I had a talented Jr. Engineer who had joined my Engineering department from a code school – one of those 12 weeks intensive "learn to code and find a 6 figure job" types popular around 2015.

When he left, he went to work for another company, in part because he wanted to see what other companies were like.

When we checked in later and I asked what he thought of his new job, his first remark was, "Well, the caliber of the people here is much lower."

What we discussed later was even more interesting, though.

He didn't think people at his new company were bothered: they didn't seem to notice or care that they were "lower caliber."

The reason for that is that standards vary. High standards are not a given, or the default – they are built.

Standards vary because competence varies.

In most valuable areas of work, like evaluating software engineers, managers, executives, or choosing technologies and strategies, you can only tell good from bad if you're really competent. In many areas, competence is required for accurate evaluations.

When I'm playing the guitar for my wife or my mom, and I get "Wow, you're so good!" part of it is unconditional love (love you too!), but part of it is their lack of guitar playing expertise. When I play the same section to my guitar teacher and he frowns his forehead and distorts his face, I know I'm dealing with different standards.

You can't have high standards without a high level of competence in most complex areas of work and life.

Once you have those high standards, though, you must choose.

And choosing in real life is very, very hard.

Making great evaluations with missing information

Most critical choices at work and in life are made with missing information.

Your odds of making good choices with missing information will also vary with your competence: the more you know, the more you can fill in the gaps.

I remember on one of my first guitar classes, a couple decades ago, my first guitar teacher said: "Right now, you listen to a track and just hear a jumble of instruments, but eventually, you'll be able to tell even how many cymbals the drumkit has."

That's what competence filling up gaps looks like: your competence allows you to make high-percentage deductions about missing information in the current situation based on context.

In the book This Is Your Brain on Music, Daniel Levitin talks about a friend who has what seems like a piano repertoire of 1,000+ songs. But then he talks about how knowing a lot about music theory and harmony allows his friend to guess correctly which chord to play next in case he forgets it, making seamless transitions back to parts he remembers.

You'll also often see this phenomenon on really strong software engineers who are familiar with a code base when debugging issues: they're seemingly running the code in their head, simulating what likely happened in order to know what to look for next.

When choosing a place to live, a career, a co-founder, a Product strategy, or a right-hand Director, your competence will allow you to evaluate the right criteria and simulate the missing info with a higher level of accuracy.

And so your higher competence leads you to make better critical decisions with missing information.

Choosing efficiently: high-standards satisficer

With a high level of competence, we now have all the pieces necessary to make great decisions:

1. Building amazing top of pipeline.
2. Having high standards.
3. Evaluating accurately with missing information.

All that's left for us is to decide, and that's where being a high-standards satisficer comes in, where we go back and take a lesson from the secretary problem.

So here's step four of how to make great choices, efficiently:

1. Build amazing top of pipeline.
2. Have high standards.
3. Evaluate accurately with missing information.
4. Choose whoever first passes your high standards bar.

Instead of coming up with standards based on your pool, like the secretary problem does, you come up with your own high standards based on your competence.

And because choice has both choosing and opportunity cost, not only because choosing is expensive but because not choosing is often even more so, you choose quickly and stop paying these costs as soon as you can, coming out ahead from prolonging your choice as a maximizer would, and focusing your resources on the next choice.

A high-standards satisficer makes great decisions.

Efficiently.

Becoming a high-standards satisficer

The most important thing to do to make great decisions as a high-standards satisficer is to build your competence.

By choosing as a high-standards satisficer, you make great decisions by having great choices to pick from, being clear about what good looks like, evaluating accurately, and being decisive.

Most importantly, this allows you to make great decisions efficiently, freeing you up to focus on your next big thing.