Expand Your Options: Deferring Goals, Transferring Skills, and Making Work a Game

Seven Ways to Become More Capable—How to Make Choices How do we choose well? Decision psychology suggests that people generally satisfice rather than optimize. We examine familiar options in sequence and accept the first meeting our internal standard, abandoning the rest. We do not compare every option and then select the best, as we imagine. The quality of a choice therefore depends heavily on the standard used. Finding something good begins with wanting to find it and setting a high standard. Highly capable people’s standards usually come from within. Most people’s standards shift with their surroundings as they unconsciously adapt and reduce conflict. Setting high internal standards is the first step. Next, expand the options. When a problem arises, two or three solutions usually come to mind. Consider that more ingenious and reasonable solutions must exist that you do not know. Limited knowledge, experience, and exposure hide potential options and information. Implicit assumptions in our minds create further barriers. Three tools can help break these barriers. First, deferring a goal. When the time is not right, set the goal aside temporarily. This is not abandoning it, but waiting for better timing. Stanford began an academic reform in 2015, replacing four continuous years with six years that students could use through repeated returns throughout life. This was an experiment in deferring goals: earning a diploma ceased to be urgent and could alternate with work and life. Second, grafting capabilities. This means transferring skills. Increasingly specialized knowledge sometimes helps solve practical problems but can also confine thinking within a narrow field. Third, transforming an activity’s characteristics. Make work into a game, something interesting, enjoyable, or a passion. Three conditions suffice: clear goals, suitable difficulty, and timely feedback. Know what you are doing. Difficulty should be slightly above your ability—not so high that failure frustrates you, nor so low that boredom removes any challenge. Timely feedback maintains attention and achievement. Work on these three dimensions to make an activity engaging and enter a state of effortless concentration. These frameworks help escape extreme either-or choices. Reorganize time so ideals and reality can coexist. Find connections between choices and transfer capabilities across them. Transform work into a passion and a passion into a career. A capable person never stops seeking more options. The best choices often come from what we create under the guidance of higher goals. #Dedao audio summary of 精進