5.4 Navigate levels effectively.
Reality exists at different levels and each of them gives you different but valuable perspectives. It’s important to keep all of them in mind as you synthesize and make decisions, and to know how to navigate between them.
Let’s say you’re looking at your hometown on Google Maps. Zoom in close enough to see the buildings and you won’t be able to see the region surrounding your town, which can tell you important things. Maybe your town sits next to a body of water. Zoom in too close and you won’t be able to tell if the shoreline is along a river, a lake, or an ocean. You need to know which level is appropriate to your decision.
We are constantly seeing things at different levels and navigating between them, whether we know it or not, whether we do it well or not, and whether our objects are physical things, ideas, or goals. For example, you can navigate levels to move from your values to what you do to realize them on a day-to-day basis. This is what that looks like in outline:
1 The High-Level Big Picture: I want meaningful work that’s full of learning.
1.1 Subordinate Concept: I want to be a doctor.
‧ Sub-Point: I need to go to medical school.
‧ Sub-Sub Point: I need to get good grades in the sciences.
‧ Sub-Sub-Sub Point: I need to stay home tonight and study.
To observe how well you do this in your own life, pay attention to your conversations. We tend to move between levels when we talk.
a. Use the terms “above the line” and “below the line” to establish which level a conversation is on.
An above-the-line conversation addresses the main points and a below-the-line conversation focuses on the sub-points. When a line of reasoning is jumbled and confusing, it’s often because the speaker has gotten caught up in below-the-line details without connecting them back to the major points. An above-the-line discourse should progress in an orderly and accurate way to its conclusion, only going below the line when it’s necessary to illustrate something about one of the major points.
b. Remember that decisions need to be made at the appropriate level, but they should also be consistent across levels.
For instance, if you want to have a healthy life, you shouldn’t have twelve sausage links and a beer every day for breakfast. In other words, you need to constantly connect and reconcile the data you’re gathering at different levels in order to draw a complete picture of what’s going on. Like synthesizing in general, some people are naturally better at this than others, but anyone can learn to do this to one degree or another. To do it well, it’s necessary to:
- Remember that multiple levels exist for all subjects.
- Be aware on what level you’re examining a given subject.
- Consciously navigate levels rather than see subjects as undifferentiated piles of facts that can be browsed randomly.
- Diagram the flow of your thought processes.
When you do all this with radical open-mindedness, you will become more aware not just of what you’re seeing, but what you’re not seeing and what others, perhaps, are. It’s a little like when jazz musicians jam; knowing what level you’re on allows everyone to play in the same key. When you know your own way of seeing and are open to others’ ways too, you can create good conceptual jazz together rather than just screech at each other. Now let’s go up a level and examine deciding.
DECIDE WELL
Using decision-making logic to produce the best long-term outcomes has become its own science—one that employs probabilities and statistics, game theory, and other tools. While many of these tools are helpful, the fundamentals of effective decision making are relatively simple and timeless—in fact they are genetically encoded in our brains to varying degrees. Watch animals in the wild and you’ll see that they instinctively make expected value calculations to optimize the energy they expend to find food. Those that did this well prospered and passed on their genes through the process of natural selection; those that did it poorly perished. While most humans who do this badly won’t perish, they will certainly be penalized by the process of economic selection.
As previously explained, there are two broad approaches to decision making: evidence/logic-based (which comes from the higher-level brain) and subconscious/emotion-based (which comes from the lower-level animal brain).
* Source: Principles by Ray Dalio