An example of assumptions: Many people think they want to be a doctor, based on what they’ve heard about it, or watching House, or based on the expectations of their parents. Many doctors are exhausted and miserable (and so stressed it actually compromises their health). Each person entering med school likely assumes that the reasons they have for wanting to be a doctor will mean that they’ll enjoy being a doctor more than most other people, and yet — this doesn’t hold up for most individuals!
In general, one key piece of advice from research into happiness is that people aren’t good at predicting how much they’ll enjoy things. And there’s a simple technique that can make you way better:
“That’s to find out how people who are experiencing the events that you’re only imagining are feeling about them.
One of the very best ways to find out if you’re going to enjoy taking a job at a particular law firm is simply to see how happy the people who work there are. That sounds like amazingly simple advice and it really is.
We found two things in our studies. One, using this method of making predictions can increase people’s accuracy dramatically. Two, absolutely nobody wants to do it… they believe their imagination will lead them to be much more accurate. In fact, they’re wrong.”
So, if you’re currently looking at a career choice (on any scale, whether you’re a student thinking about your whole life arc or you’re just considering changing companies) there’s a very straightforward piece of advice here: talk to someone who’s doing what you imagine you might do, and find out what it’s like for them.
Identifying Assumptions
More generally, you can try to explore what unexamined assumptions might lie in the plans that you currently have.
Pick a goal or some aspect of your plan, then try writing (or speaking) the sentence “This wouldn’t work if…” and seeing what ideas come to mind. Now consider, are you certain that those things are all true?
Consider that some people have probably tried & failed to do what you’re setting out to do. See if you can find such a someone, then ask why it didn’t work.
If you can’t think of anything, ask the coaches for suggestions.
Testing Assumptions
Having identified some important assumptions, you can then do a few things. One is to attempt to test those assumptions early.
There’s an organization called X, that’s part of Google/Alphabet, that is working on moonshots—tackling wild problems in radical ways. Sometimes you might have a solution that’s only 10% likely to work, but if it did it would be amazing. But you want to find out whether it’s going to work as soon as you possibly can, rather than investing a ton of time & money solving the 9/10 sub-problems you already knew you could solve, only to discover that that 1 sub-problem that you weren’t sure you could solve… is absolutely impossible (or 100× as expensive as expected).
Much better to build a prototype or run an experiment to test that sub-problem first, if you can.
More examples:
- For startups, this often looks like putting up a sales page before you’ve created your product, to test the assumption “people will want to buy this”. Kickstarter is explicitly made for doing this.
- Before buying a house with someone or signing a 1-year lease, rent an AirBnB with them for a week and try living there, to test the assumption that you’ll like living together. It may seem expensive, but if you can afford it it’s less costly than being stuck living with someone you hate living with.
For each of the assumptions you identified above, ask yourself “how can I get more data on this sooner rather than later?” Set a 1-3 minute timer for each, and just free-write.
You might not come up with anything (feasible) which is okay too. Sometimes it’s not possible to test your assumptions early out early. But it could also be that the way to test it is itself blocked by some other unquestioned assumption you’re making—try telling the coaches about your plan & its assumptions, and see if they can think of a cheaper way to test the assumptions.
…but if you can’t know yet…
We also have an exercise called Scenario Planning, which guides you through planning for different future scenarios based on factors out of your control, when you can’t know in advance what will happen. If at the end of this exercise you’re still sitting with some huge uncertainties, this could be something to pursue.
Another lens on this is making bets, which is particularly relevant if the uncertainties seem to produce outcomes like “either this will work or it won’t”, with little in between.