Business
Wouldn’t it be great if we could reduce life to a simple set of equations? Well, if that idea is appealing you just might be in luck. Today’s episode of BTO is all about work and life equations. The conversation was prompted by a provocative post that Mike made recently about his formula for knowing when to leave a job. It was expressed, rather elegantly, as: Current job (joy - pain) < potential job (excitement - fear) There was more to it than that, but that notion - of reducing complicated considerations into symbolic equations - caught people’s imagination, and it prompted us to do a whole program about our favorite such algorithms. Here are just some of the ones we discuss on the show: - Happiness = pleasure + purpose over time (h/t to Paul Dolan) - Life Design Principles = Authenticity + Agency - “Happiness is wanting what you have, not getting what you want” (singer - and philosopher! - Sheryl Crow) We also break down why these simplifications are so appealing to us today. We all want formulas and algorithms to make sense of our world, but also to help us navigate it. As thinking tools are influenced by pop culture and the zeitgeist, the ubiquity of the PC and now the mobile phone has made us all a bit more inclined to think like a computer, we argue. Finally, we’ll tackle their limits. Equations are seductive thinking tools, but they can be dangerously reductionist. While it’s tantalizing to believe that we can “rationalize” emotions and transform them into algorithms, the truth of the matter is that life is not that black and white. There’s a lot of grey in those equals (=) deductions/minuses (-) and multiplications (x), so we need to be careful in applying - and relying - on these mental shortcuts. Here's one final equation: Listening to this episode = learning cool new algorithms for work + life!