Limit the non-negotiables

# Chapter 313

The 12 hours weren’t enough. Not enough thinking time and not enough percolating time. More than enough sitting time though, my body does not like those 700 mile road trips, even though my mind does. But as I was saying, not enough time. Too many variables to calculate, on too many possibilities and this is starting to feel a little bit like ordering food in an American restaurant. What I mean by that is that there are too many choices at play here.

American restaurants always cause me and my wife a good deal of stress because we are accustomed to living in Eastern Europe where the options are far less. In Russia if you were lucky enough to find a place to eat at all while on the road, there was no menu for they only had one dish per day that they were serving. Perfection! While that may not sound appetizing to you, it lowers your choice/decision fatigue to zero. The options are just far less in many places around the world where we have lived and we like that.

So when pursuing resolution to thorny problems, one of the ways to contain and constrain the size of the problem is to well define the non-negotiables. And by well define I mean limit the non-negotiables. If you are successful at doing that, then you likely will find yourself with a much more manageable resolvable problem. And since 12 hours were not enough, you guessed it, too many “non-negotiables” in this one. All those competing trade-offs will never be happy.