Whoa.
I paused for what felt like 1 full second in the middle of my home-alone cardio session on the stairs and said out loud.
I was listening to an interview with Annie Duke on The Knowledge Project where she told a story about trying to order food at a Chinese restaurant. Trying to explain her order, being vegan and gluten intolerant, to a non native speaker. Annie told her friend afterwards that she feels it was a 72% chance she would be getting her orders correctly. Then her friend, also deep in probabilistic thinking, gave his take that it’s probably closer to 65%. And she said how convenient and interesting that they share this common language and ways of viewing the world — embracing uncertainty.
I had an aha moment because it reminds me of something I noticed about the way I speak.
I would throw out offhanded remarks about “I feel x% well today“, or how I think “there’s a 55% chance of this thing happening anyway“.
I just assign probabilities to random day to day events.
I wasn’t aware about this before someone pointed it out to me 2-3 years ago. And I haven’t brought it to my attention much again since.
Apparently this is something I do by default. I think in a nuanced and probabilistic manner.
I like to quantify things; tangible and intangible things.
And the kick is, I currently do this professionally without any conscious deliberateness.
I deconstruct, tinker, research, estimate, and make decisions on many variables with often changing tradeoffs. I am also making it part of my personal challenge and experiment to explore and establish a good decision making process to scale this process to my team.
I get to play to my strengths.
What a nice full circle. Things always fall into place quite perfectly.
Or at least that’s the belief I use to rationalise my life, the lens I use to view the world.
Self awareness is such an amazing quest.
What are some of the built-in software you have installed in you? Do you notice them?
