Hi nanbargale! Kaalai vanakam 🤓🙏 

So, iniki post edhapathi na, Decision-making pathi dhan paaka porom. I will explain how I make decisions step-by-step using my own real life experiences. No fluff.

Most people struggle with decisions like "what should I study?" "Will learning AI get me a 1 crore-per-annum package?" 🤭

"How to get a job?" "Should I propose my crush? And will she accept?" ....

First uh, I would personally never prefer asking such questions to anyone. Because, no single answer works for everyone. One specific answer to such questions may become one's best decision of their life and another one's worst decision simultaneously. We all are NOT the same and we possess DIFFERENT strengths and weaknesses. Only you know what your strengths and weaknesses are. You should tailor your decisions accordingly.

Next uh,

***Most people ask "How do I get selected?"***

***I ask "Why would they want to select me?"***

This was a game-changer for me.

Before starting the technique, I will need to spark one essential thought in you.

***Every action has incentives behind it.***

So, my technique is all about gaming this self-interest.

Whenever I have to make some decision or interact with people, I will look if there is any benefit for both sides. If there is nothing beneficial for even one party, I would drop the decision at that moment itself. Your decision will be least risky and most optimised when a decision benefits both ends equally. It need not always be exactly equal but I would suggest you to try your best to keep the difference in gains between the parties as small as possible.

Because in reality, most decisions are not one-sided. There is always another party involved : an employer, mentor, friend, or organization and they also have their own goals.

So I always try to understand:

\-> What are they optimizing for?

\-> What risks are they trying to avoid?

\-> What makes me a safe and valuable choice for them?

For example, This is how I got my internship. The internship itself is very blunt. They just say "there are these opportunities, see which interests you and apply for it".They will never directly tell you what they actually benefit from. I thought "what is beneficial for them in doing this?" "What risks do they have in selecting a wrong candidate and how will I eliminate such scenarios if I were in their place" "They MUST not be going out of their self-interest.." and I understood what they needed. They needed a student who is capable of learning the work, doing enough work, and one who has the potential to TAKE up their position in the upcoming years. The risk they had is that these organisations are just participants just like us students and they will also have to meet some criteria and perform well to get funded again. Let's say Google is the one funding these organisations for this program and giving selected students their stipends. I thought "Why would google go all their way to fund this?" "What is pushing them to conduct such programs?" So, it is not a single answer. Google is dependent on these participating organisations to some extent and these organisations are run completely by volunteers. Not many people would volunteer for such works unless there are any direct benefits. So, if there is a lack of manpower in these organisations and their quality of product suffers, it would adversely affect Google in a very bad way and it HAS already happened multiple times Fr. The next point is that as college students, one common thing among most of us is that we all are desperate for money and internship stuff in this particular stage and the CORPORATE just games with us and our self-interest, just like we do with them. Internships in general are already extremely competitive, so they will be funding for only a 1000 people and will get a FREE branding/advertisement of over 1 lakh people. Most wouldn't apply and the rest won't get selected. Still Google won't wish to have their money go in vain. So, they select these organisations on a performance basis. If an organisation got a mentee in a previous year funded by google and he didn't do enough work for the stipend he received or he dropped the internship halfway, it is a LOSS for google. So, they will blacklist this organisation for the upcoming years.

All this pointed to the fact,

\-> The Organisation needs someone who won't disappear halfway through the internship, will work enough, SHOWS the potential to replace them in future and will continue volunteering even after the program/funding period.

So, I showed up every single day for 6 months straight -> Reliability ✅

Worked enough even before the application started -> proof that I will work enough ✅

Imitated their role to make an impression that I possess the potential to replace them -> They will believe that they got a reliable volunteer who will continue their work ✅

So, most of the applicants feared to even participate because they thought they had no chance against the elite students from IITs, NITs and other elite institutes.

I entered the game as a first year student with not much skills to compete but a plan to make it work. I successfully positioned myself as a better choice compared to my competitors who were final year/pre-final year students, students who possessed greater technical prowess than I did. And, I eventually got selected 😉

It's the same layout of everything : Job search, skills to learn and even relationships.

Long-term relationships tend to survive only when both sides consistently feel they are getting value from the relationship.

I have been making my decisions on this basis for a long time. Only later I realised that this is a part of game theory : The prisoner's dilemma and Nash's equilibrium

I can go deeper and deeper in this topic but it will make the post really long (it already is). So I will stop here and let the rest of the thinking happen on your side.

Hope you enjoyed this post. Let me know your thoughts in the comments. See you in the next post, bah bye 🤗

Daily self-help posts day 2 : Decision-making