Autonomy and Optionality

Autonomy: the ability to make decisions for yourself and execute them.

Optionality: the quantity of options available to choose from at any given point.

Optionality

If you “have optionality,” you don’t have much need for what is commonly called intelligence, knowledge, insight, skills, and these complicated things that take place in our brain cells. For you don’t have to be right that often. All you need is the wisdom to not do unintelligent things to hurt yourself (some acts of omission) and recognize favorable outcomes when they occur.

Antifragile – N Nassim Taleb

Over the years, these two things have seemed to become increasingly important both in my own life as I navigate a career and lifestyle choices, and what seems to be of the people around me: how everyone navigates their careers and lifestyles (well or not).

As they've come up, I seem to have built a weird opinion: goals are incredibly limiting for optionality.

Or rather, the types of goals we usually make are limiting.

For example: if I was rolling some dice and wanted two 6's the options are incredibly low: there's only one configuration of the roll that is a success.

The wider version / the lowered bar version is to say "I want a 4+ on each dice" because now you have some options and the statistics increase: you could get a 4,5,6 + 4,5,6 on each which is 9 outcomes.

But my goal often, metaphorically here, is "I want to roll some dice" and at some level, the outcome doesn't matter if the fun and success is in the roll itself. Maybe finding the dice themselves is a challenge and so just getting to roll them is a rare event or some significant thing. The numbers don't matter.

You can reframe whatever your goals are in this way and see if they even make sense, and maybe that's a good place to start rebuilding them or reframing what your definitions of success are. Sometimes things are just limited in optionality - that can be fine too. Some goals really do have one specific success condition and our goal really is to roll snake eyes.

As it relates to careers: I don't think I've ever had a specific career goal. I've never really known what the end point looks like as much as I know what I'd like to being doing in whatever sort of context that works out to become. There's almost a noun / verb divide to the goal-making. It'd be fragile to say "I'd like to be a 5th grade teacher" and then be disappointed when you're assigned to 9th grade instead, out of your control. Perhaps the goal is "I'd like to teach kids" or something instead, wherever that takes you. Maybe you aren't even a teacher at all, maybe you're a youtuber who makes English tutorials for Korean children - is that part of the goal verb? Sure!

So we can define what sorts of goals we make, and we can define what they look like when we're doing the thing we want to be doing even if it's not necessarily defining what we become.

That's allowing for optionality.

But the biggest thing, I think, is that we strive for and maintain autonomy:

Autonomy

The ability to chart your life's path cannot be understated or outsourced. There's a phrase that is often applied to employees with bosses: "if any one person can suddenly change your entire life without consulting you, you need to diffuse that power."

How autonomous are you if you rely entirely on that one person to pay you? How much do you lower your head in order to keep that good favor? Even if they're a great boss, maybe the business has to downsize out of their control and you're let go - what then? Or platforms: if you're relying on youtube ad revenue to pay for your life and they suddenly change the rules like they seem to do yearly, what then? Patreon. Etsy. Amazon. These platforms aren't beholden to you any more than a boss is, and certainly less empathetic as a faceless policy. On the other hand, if you suddenly disavow any bosses or platforms or clients or whatever you'll likely struggle to make any money at all and your net autonomy goes down. So you can see the interplay between these things: the autonomy of having a job but making money both adds to and takes away your net autonomy. ...and so the ideas of FU Money come up, the idea that if you save up some buffer and can easily quit at any time and be fine, you'll take less guff from that sort of power dynamic. You're allowing the negative autonomy of the job exist in order to gain (hopefully more) autonomy from having the cash stockpile. Part II might be alternative sources of income. Eventually a bunch of small streams become a river. If any one of them falters, there's a safety net of incoming money. This is sort of like optionality for income.

There are a lot of people - a shocking number of people - who make $150k+ a year and are living paycheque to paycheque because their spending is so high.

They might be rich, but they are fragile. They are not wealthy.

Meanwhile, someone like me who is making a more average amount can do anything I want because my income is still, say, 5x my spending - the sheer overhead savings rate allows for autonomy. I have something like 2+ years of living expenses sitting around just in case. FU money stacks up because I've prioritized that freedom over buying some fancy car or some bigger house or whatever.

So too with time: what good is a high income if you can never spend it doing things? Never take vacation, never hang with your family, never take naps in the afternoon etc. If you're making money but you're trapped in your work hours, you aren't living autonomous. You're unable to choose your priorities.

Autonomy is a great place to be. It's arguably the metric for wealthy in a way mere money can't be.

The API Divide

We talk about it on the podcast, but the API divide describes being above or below the platform level: I can be a freelancer who makes apps or I can be a "freelance" Uber driver who is told where to go and what to do by the app.

This is / will become the divide.

Millions of people will be sorted above and below this gap in the coming future.

Ideally, you're not on the below side for all the same reasons mentioned above. Being an Uber driver (et al.) might sound like freedom from bosses and give you the choice to work or pause when you want - and perhaps they do, perhaps that's some perk - but ultimately if you're not making enough to be building up the FU money, if you're relying on the app to keep you alive day to day, it's probably a fragile place to be.

We can get out of those sorts of immediate limitations by lowering our spending but realistically the goal is to get ourselves above the divide into the greener pastures of less competition and higher earning potential by doing our own thing and setting our own prices for services.

Conclusion

In summary, autonomy is the ability for you to make choices.

If you're trapped, even if you have a lot of any given resource, can you effectively trade it? Can you spend it? Can you use it? If you can't, you're not very autonomous.

Optionality is your ability to / quantity of having multiple choices to make. If you only want one thing, you have to work increasingly hard on the specifics to get there. If you only have one source of income, you have to make sure it stays alive like tending a single candle. If you like one kind of beer, you better hope that brewery never changes. Throughout life we'll all swing around from having one to having many of each of these, but I think it's important to recognize where you are and, if you're wanting to change it, see the alternatives effectively.

And then by default, always be trying to slowly build them up, bit by bit, more and more open.