人生复本

“I used to think that life was about reaching some perfect destination. Because I had’t reached it yet, I felt somehow ill at ease. But I had seen the perfection I had reached it and I am starting to suspect that it is the imperfections of life that amount to a different kind of perfection.”

Life is all about trade-offs. No choice is perfect. We have to determine what is a priority, then what comes second, and so on. It’d be better to make a list, assign weights and discount factors to each item. Remember that it’s not just a single choice, but a series of them that shape who you are. Identify your preferences and their order, and then act on them. This is how you maximize your own life’s utility function.

This year, I probably made the worst decision of my life. I asked myself, what would it lead to? I am the one in charge. To some extent, what I need to do is to identify my own objective function, prioritize the items, and work on maximizing it.