Prabodh Kumar Enumula

I see people making tradeoffs every day at work – sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously. I believe it is so very critical that they need to lot more formally introduced at a younger age. It took a while for me to see this clearly, but once tradeoffs are understood they help a ton to get peace in life 🙂

Many a times, world around encourages to think in terms of booleans. It makes you think decisions/ideas works arounds booleans but it rarely does that way. Sometimes not able to think of tradeoffs, will actually bring the entire thing to a failure. To take a tech analogy which i am closer to – I might think to build most beautiful code is a boolean process and spend months doing it very sincerely (because no one wants to write bad code). But it might end up delaying everything else so much that the business for which i am building might cease to exist. The tradeoff needs to be made to ensure we don’t loose touch of why we are building systems in first place and then make decisions around what helps progress there.

Tradeoffs cannot be used as a way to do things in shabby way, thats where the value system comes into play about what kind of tradeoffs you are ok with. But it turns out there are ton of things where we can make simple tradeoffs to make progress.

I believe tradeoffs help progress. Ability to make tradeoffs help people take ownership. Ability to understand tradeoffs help people align better . People(/Systems/Companies ) who can make right trade offs can drive change. It might happen incrementally, but very likely to progress than just thinking very boolean.
My worldview now is to usually view decisions/processes as a point in a spectrum than one of the boolean ends. And try to understand towards which side of the spectrum we are heading, the direction in which we want to make progress. The moment i understand that, it is very easy to align and be at peace with imperfections in the system.
What are the things which help you stay at peace in a complicated world