Condition on Success

Suppose you are playing a fighting game and you are hit with a move that kills you 50% of the time. What do you do? Which buttons do you input into your controller, and how do you think about this?

You should play as if you are going to live. It does not matter what buttons you press if you are dead: you’re dead.

This holds in general. You must carry yourself as if you have whatever talent you most desire and make every decision as if it is a guarantee you will succeed, because it ultimately does not matter what you do if you didn’t have it. Say you are applying for a job. If the job/industry/etc was never going to be a good fit for you anyway, it doesn’t matter what you do. So you should prepare for the interviews assuming you have what it takes and act accordingly during the interview.

As a concrete example, I would often spend more time thinking of “what questions should I ask to appear maximally interested in a certain role” as opposed to “conditioned on me getting the role (i.e. success), what questions would I have wanted to know the answers to?” These days I think about the latter, and I realize that as a bonus, these questions are the ones that probably make you look the best anyway.

It is important that your definition of success is not too narrow. If your only goal is to get X job, then you are completely screwed if X rejects you. You can only pivot if your definition is broad.

But really you should have multiple definitions of success at different levels of specificity. If your narrow goal is to get X job, this is something you can still condition on, but you also have to think broadly and realize this is not the best way to get into Y industry, or even that Y industry is not the best way to generally live a happy and financially secure life. This is why it is important to figure out your values: at the end of the day, this is the problem you are principally aiming to solve.

In real life you won’t always think so broadly and should usually have the specifics figured out, but you always should keep your values in the back of your mind because things can change dramatically over time. You don’t want to be committed down a certain path in life when it no longer the path that best serves your broader goals. (For example, several of my math PhD friends are realizing that there is some merit to pivoting because AI has made academia no longer the best path for their goals of solving interesting problems and teaching.)