Automate Your Way to Your Goals With This Decision Analysis Technique
Everything you encountered today, you’ve encountered before.
The scenarios may have involved new people, or happened in a new place, or with a new context. But once you’ve lived past a certain age, the vast majority of your experiences become “versions” of other things you’ve seen before.
That’s one of the key insights from Principles by Ray Dalio.
His book clearly lays out how wise people analyze these repetitions to craft success.
Once you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all
Whether it’s at work, home, or in relationships, the same handful of 40–60 problem sets or decisions tend to arise with some regularity.
For example, for me, the “I don’t want to go to that social event” scenario happens over and over and over.
If we can start to see these patterns, and then learn to habitually react to similar scenarios in a way that optimizes our goals, then we can learn to “automate” our way to success.
Recognize the repetition
To do that, we have to first see the repetition in our lives. Ray suggests capturing decisions we’ve made and problems we’ve faced on paper.
Write them down so you can analyze their similarities.
You can do this separately for scenarios at work or school, for friendships, family relationships, romantic relationships, physical health, mental health, and so on.
You’ll want to capture as many different scenarios as possible and analyze:
- Context about the scenario (the who, what, when, where, why)
- How did the scenario make you feel?
- What assumptions or facts did you have or did you believe to be true?
- What did you do?
- What was the outcome?
For more detail on this framework, here is a Decision Log I keep for my major decisions. This framework can be expanded for all decisions big or small.
Optimize for your goals
Ray makes the simple (but not easy) suggestion that in order to decide how to act in each scenario, we must first decide what we want.
- Career advancement?
- More money?
- More friends?
- Peace of mind?
To give an example, one of my life goals or values is to build and maintain strong relationships. Despite my occasional bouts of social anxiety, I know that strong relationships are the key to happiness in life.
So, to make sure I’m not sabotaging this goal, I’ve actually tracked how often I feel like “I don’t want to go to the party.”
By tracking over 8 different events, I’ve learned a ton.
Turns out that 90% of the time, I end up having a fun time and being glad I went. This happens whether I go alone or with someone else or whether I’m close to people at the party or not. That said, I also learned that I tend to have more fun at weekday parties than weekend parties, likely because on weekdays I can limit the time spent (for me, fun starts to decrease after about 3 hours). Fun also increases with the amount of alcohol, but with an upper limit of 3 before things go south😅.
So I optimize for social events. I don’ sweat them anymore.
I say yes, but put boundaries in place to make sure that, given my personality, I can stay happy and also build relationships.
The journey of self-discovery
Aligning your personality and your goals so you repeatedly behave in a way that suits them both is challenging.
It will require overcoming mental, physical, and emotional hurdles that feel extremely difficult to move.
What I like about Ray’s process is that if you can first recognize a repeating pattern (“every time I have a conversation with so-and-so I feel X and react with Y” or “every time I start X I feel Y and I quit”) you can at least experiment with different behaviours and note how they go.
You may not be able to react “perfectly” on the first try, but that’s ok.
Iteration and learning are part of the process.
In fact, learning about yourself and seeing your life more clearly is the point of the process. Direction matters more than speed — slow growth is still growth.
Best of luck.
