How to Figure Out What to Do in Life

Years back I read the book “Lean Startup.” The premise is that startups maximize success by testing quickly, learning quickly, and iterating rapidly. I thought - why can’t this apply to life in general? That’s the concept I call “lean human.” Don’t worry, I don’t mean being a jacked gym bro. The lean human formula is: Amount of experiences x Amount of feedback x Luck = Happiness.

Breaking this down

Let’s use romantic relationships as an example [1]. To find an ideal partner you need to:

Maximize dating experiences
Maximize feedback from each experience
Get lucky Maximizing experiences means going on the highest quantity of (quality) dates per month that you can. Talk to strangers, use dating apps, ask your social network for introductions. Maximizing feedback means intricately analyzing each date, both during and after. Now say you went on a date, and they want to see you again. Great. Ask yourself:

Did I display attractive traits - humor, manners, confidence?
Were there moments of strong connection around shared values?
What specifically made them want to see me again? If the date went bad, you can even ask them right after:
“Is there anything I could have done better?”
“Why didn’t we end up seeing each other again?” Gauge their answer. Was it a bad joke? A political position? Spilling your drink on them? With that feedback, you can draw conclusions: I need to improve my humor, filter out my topics of conversations, be less clumsy. We’ve highlighted 2 types of feedback: intrinsic and extrinsic.

Creating extrinsic and intrinsic feedback loops

Extrinsic feedback, or obvious feedback, comes from outside. It shows you clearly what you’re bad at. For example, if you start surfing and get wiped out by every single wave, you don’t need self-reflection to realize you need to improve your pop-up. Getting a surf teacher can even add more feedback loops as they’ll tell you is the position of your hands that sucks. Intrinsic feedback comes from experiences where life or people don’t give you direct feedback. It’s implicit. Like deciding what to do for a living. It’s much easier to improve your dating skills or your surfing than your career because feedback loops are more subtle for your career. And even if you do get feedbacks, you might miss them. That’s why that one is harder. That’s what we call “repeating the same mistakes”. Like leaving your consulting job for another just for the salary bump. When you don’t like consulting in the first place. It takes time and a good amount of introspection to understand what you like, what skills you’re good at, whether you want to work for yourself, or prefer working behind a laptop or outdoors, etc…

The Luck Factor

Paul Graham said in his essay, “How to Do Great Work”

What should you do if you’re young and ambitious but don’t know what to work on? What you should not do is drift along passively, assuming the problem will solve itself. You need to take action. But there is no systematic procedure you can follow. When you read biographies of people who’ve done great work, it’s remarkable how much luck is involved. They discover what to work on as a result of a chance meeting, or by reading a book they happen to pick up. So you need to make yourself a big target for luck, and the way to do that is to be curious. Try lots of things, meet lots of people, read lots of books, ask lots of questions.

So how do you maximize luck? By maximizing experiences. Luck and experiences are 2 different variables of the lean human equation, but they correlate. The best way to maximize experiences is to make decisions fast. And it means conscious decisions. Ones that are clear in your mind. Like deciding to quit your job, talk to strangers, or take pottery classes. Decisions allow you to live experiences that build skills that help you grow. Here is how to become a lean human:

Make decisions quickly to drive experiences
Create consistent external feedback loops
Develop rigorous internal feedback through self-reflection
Watch skills, and happiness, compound

That’s how you become a lean human.

[1] I am not a dating expert nor my dating life is an example. I am using this for the sake of clarity.