If You Had Already Won

Ankur Moitra: So much of our society now is geared towards winning and looking good on paper, and I always wonder to what end. You start off in high school and you can start, as soon as you walk in the door, optimizing your APs and your extracurriculars so that you can get to an elite school. And then when you get to that elite school, you might skip classes because, you know, maybe the important thing is to prepare for your interviews so that you can get a job at a frontier lab, and then you can get some nice, you know, restricted stock units and live out your life. And that’s great. You won. You won at every stage, but so what?

You know, for me, the, you know, the best way to live a rich and fulfilling life is just to pretend you’ve already won, and then figure out what you would do in that scenario. I remember the advice I got when I started at MIT as faculty. Sanjeev Arora told me, “You know, the easiest way to get tenure is just to pretend you already have it and do what you would have wanted to do all along.”

So I don’t know if that advice applies to, you know, graduate students, to high schoolers too, but I think my advice stays the same. Pretend you already have tenure. What would you now do? ‘Cause a lot of the people we’re giving advice to have really so many different opportunities. Finding something that you really believe in is the only way I know to be fulfilled.

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Lex Fridman: And I think there’s a lot of wisdom in what Ankur says. You can be paralyzed by that fear, or you can imagine, “I’ve already won. What would the person who has won do in this situation?” And that alleviates the fear. It actually takes the– gives you the optimal path under uncertainty.

From Lex Fridman Podcast #503 (video, from 3:27:58); text from the official transcript.

What surprised me is that I’ve used this method myself before: imagine a goal has already been reached, and ask what you would do then. It’s a very good way to think, because it helps you work out what you really want, instead of being pushed along by all kinds of constraints.