The Borsalino Test #1: The Lead Domino
Hi friends!
I decided to start this newsletter as an evolving collection of strings that could someday spun into a larger story. For now, I will publish here my essays that cross between topics including tech, personal growth and decision making.
Through writing, I try to give back what I enjoy learning: how to think, wait, and fast. Arguably, that’s most of what you need: good decision-making rules, a long-term plan and uncommon resilience to withstand difficulties.
Why ‘The Borsalino’s Hat Test’? Everyone who's read Shantaram, my favorite novel, would find this redundant. The Borsalino is this wide-brimmed hat made from very particular furs. Now this piece of art apparently digs quite the hole in your pocket, and there's bound to be fakes. In comes the Borsalino hat test. You roll the hat up into tube thingy, and make it pass through a wedding ring. After emerging from the other side, if the hat is not all crumpled and messed up, you've gotten yourself a deal. If there's creases, you'd better run back and look for the genius who made some quick bucks outta you. Most will argue Borsalino tests are part of life.
You can read my essays here. Let’s go :)
Decision-making skills: the Lead Domino
I don’t want to live with Chloe anymore.
Living with Chloe was miserable. She would steal my food from the fridge and often crash into my room uninvited through a secondary entrance. She made me feel I had barely any privacy, or eggs. Chloe was approximately 25 years older than me and owned a splashy condo in Pacific Heights with a spare bedroom. We met on Craigslist when I was still fresh off the boat from Italy and rushed into a regrettable co-living experience.
Poor decisions detract from moving forward and creating a sense of freedom, or control. Conversely, good decisions are great enablers that unlock time, energy and leverage. Most importantly, they compound over time: think about healthy, smart habits like stashing 20% of your monthly salary in a savings account for years, or going for a run every morning.
These types of decisions influence our happiness, wealth and health in life. Despite that, these are almost never the memories we treasure. We often don’t track the return on investments made years ago. Or the distance ran on that morning jog three weeks ago. But we do remember where we lived, where we went to college, or the people we have dated. Our brain’s code is written to seamlessly trace back to consequential, irreversible decisions: the so-called ‘Lead Dominos’.
When you push the first domino, the long line of all dominos stacked in front of it falls sequentially. The first domino unlocks the whole sequence. It’s the power of leverage. When I signed my offer and took my first job, I immediately erased the decision on how to pay my bills from my mental notes. And many more. Lead dominos can tackle a disproportionate number of other ‘dominos’ way down the line.
Lumps and slices: the power of configuration
If you were a superhero, what would it be your superpower? Flying? Invisibility? Time travel? I, for one, would pass up these familiar options in favor of the profoundly important but woefully underrated power of configuration. That translates into the ability to slice things up when they arrive in lumps and piece them together when they show up in bits. These feats might sound elementary, but they are extraordinarily valuable and often maddeningly elusive.
Now, spare a moment to think through things that might bring you more benefit if they sliced up differently. Perhaps you would prefer a job that involves a third less work and a third less pay, or a home that is half its size except when you are entertaining, or a dog that provides double the affection and requires half the walking. Any of those sounds appealing to you?
Next, focus on things that arrive in fragments but hold almost no value to you if not assembled. Votes to create political results. The increments of studying necessary to pass a high-stakes exam. The bits of extra space between parallel-parked cars that you wish you could aggregate together to create a space large enough for your car. Getting part of the way there doesn’t always get you a proportionate share of the total benefit.
Configuration, in short, is power. It is a high form of dexterity increasingly pressing to understand and harness. Lumpiness can also generate or guide behaviors that seem to defy basic economic principles. For example, the law of diminishing marginal returns suggests that the next unit of a good will add less value than the previous unit. Lumpiness inverts that relationship. At times, one needs more of something to get any return at all.
The Lead Domino: an 80/20 on steroids
Decisions are labyrinths. Especially when grappling with life-defining commitments and knotty entanglements. What should I do with my life? Am I in the right partnership? How should I respond to this job offer? All of these characterize as consequential and irreversible decisions.
Here is an orthogonal perspective on these questions: segment them into more manageable bits, or domino tiles. If your business is facing stagnation, smaller decision bits might be: where can you cut back? If it’s a relationship you are considering, perhaps it’s worth diving into whether you want the same future as that person. How do you feel when around this person? Safe? Challenged? Content?
All domino tiles here are roughly of the same size. Bulky tiles can be excessively lumbering. Conversely, you don’t want to waste time pulverizing your decision into sub-perceptual atomic units. More tiles will extend your domino in length, and delay a chain reaction.
Once chunks are reduced to crumbles, find square one, the Lead Domino. It’s like the Pareto principle on steroids: turn on the single switch that will ignite a long string of LED bulbs. When you cut back on sedentary leisure time, you also consume less fats. Nutrition habits improves as a natural side effect of spending less time binging Netflix and mindlessly gobbling up Doritos. One habit leads to another, one domino knocks down the next.
The magic of the domino is not in the tiles, but in their interconnectedness. When you change one behavior, others shift. Naval admiral William McRaven (who oversaw the raid that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden) makes his bed every morning, even in hotels. He derives a modest sense of accomplishment and pride from tucking in the sheets, enough to carry himself onto the next task. You might start your day by flipping the duvet, and end up catching the world’s most wanted terrorist.
Winning at whack-a-mole with pen and paper.
When you drill down, the vast majority of people around you don’t have a system to identify their lead dominos. Most of us just feel submerged with tasks and perpetual speedballing. We just want to hit the volleyball back high enough to pass over the net and not think about it for as long as possible. It’s whack-a-mole all the way.
In my previous management consulting life I was never really cognizant of where my lead domino was, let alone what was it for me at any given time. Working hours were consistently extremely long. This might sound ridiculous, but I recall spending endless hours tweaking slide designs or re-building a financial model from scratch, fishing for incongruencies in my formulas in order to massage my projections. Ultimately, I did a good job with my output, but it required a ton of caffeine (5 espressos a day!). A handful of times that led to all-nighters, and my health and mood would suffer tremendously in the very next days.
So, is it really worth sacrificing my health for all of this? Easily not. The value of my time being at 100% is far greater. Second, was it really worth the opportunity cost of the clients that I was serving? Definitely not.
My old self would view any time spent away from the laptop as an unforgivable waste of time. So that’s where I started. Every time I was about to build a new slidedeck or financial model, I would start from the most counter-intuitive angle. I would shut down my laptop and migrate to an empty room with only pen and paper. I would engage in an analogic process of output visualization, illuminating the minutiae of its architecture before converting it to a digital output.
So I started thinking okay, what other areas can I apply this to? Where can I ‘waste’ some time away from my laptop, go out for a walk and only bring pen and paper with me? It has taken me a long time to realize that. It has to deal with your system of values, engrained behaviors and peer conditioning. We are brought to believe that speedballing is mostly the right way to live, or work.
Unnesting Russian dolls.
Lead dominos are everywhere. One swears by a piece of life-changing entrepreneurial advice. Others believe that meditation improves their productivity. Some visit slums to realise how fortunate they are already. Nudging a tiny domino triggers a cascade effect that leads to forging new beliefs about yourself and fabricating identity-based habits. Your self image is a mosaic of lead dominos tiles.
Sometimes I take the time to write down some of the decisions swirling around my head to crystallize my thoughts on them. It’s a powerful, cathartic exercise. Staring at the building blocks that cram your headspace rekindles connections between dots. Each bundle of perplexities turns into crates housing tiny boxes, like multiple Russian nesting dolls.
In this light, decision-making is about risk-mitigation. In order to advance, you want to visualize the immediate steps backwards. Leaning forward is inverting the route. Until you have broken it down to one small enough decision with high enough leverage on the entire chosen path. If that still does not feel comfortable enough, go back and chop wood into less consequential, more reversible logs.
Sometimes, you just can’t go head to head against obstacles and your solutions require some level of obliquity. Lead dominos are about removing roadblocks, instead of rolling hefty stones. They are elegants paths carved in the sand, so that water can flow.
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