I Think I Found Myself a Hero
and her name is Cassie Kozyrkov
Before today, if you asked me if I had any people who inspire me in my field, I would have had to say no. That’s not to say I didn’t have many heroes. I fan-girl hard and this is a blog post that proves that.
It’s just that before, most of the people I’d call a hero were professional pastry chefs or Michelle Obama, despite me having no intention of becoming a pastry chef or Michelle Obama at any point in my professional existence. Now I finally found someone I look up to in a field adjacent to my own.
You may have read in an earlier blog post that I didn’t really plan to be in the career I’m in, and that part of the difficulty that comes with that is that I started it without a path set out for me and not even a starter pack of role models in my field. That changes now.
I sometimes do a thing that even the CEO of LinkedIn doesn’t recommend where I look at successful people’s career paths and try to see if theirs somewhat resembles mine so that I can feel like I’m on a path to success. I know I’ve stumbled upon Cassie Kozyrkov on LinkedIn before and immediately clicked on her profile. Well, Kozyrkov has an interesting career path and after a few seconds of being amazed, I clicked away because that was a path I knew I couldn’t follow.
But recently, I was scrolling through LinkedIn again and someone reposted Kozyrkov’s announcement about leaving her role of Chief Decision Scientist at Google. I read her blog post about why she quit and things continued from there and now I can be one of those people who can identify a hero in their field, that field being data professions in general.
Cassie Kozyrkov is not just a hero for data professionals, though! A lot of her writing is helpful to anybody in general. She’s a decision scientist, which means that she knows where people go wrong in decision making and how to fix it. That’s relevant not only to work, but to life.
I watched a course she created called Decision Intelligence. The main meat of the course is about how anyone can be good at making any decision. These are some ideas I took away:
Use intuition where you made similar decisions before and have an “expertise”, where the decision is unstructured, like judging art, or when you don’t have much time. Avoid using intuition and put more effort in where the decision is more important, where you are given more time, and where you don’t have experience making decisions like this one.
I do think people should follow their heart sometimes, but I don’t give “Follow your Heart” any stock as a be-all truth. I’ve always wondered what the limit to that is and when not to follow your heart. The above lesson is an answer to that and says that you need more than gut instincts when facing new kinds of decisions or especially serious ones. That makes sense, because gut instincts are shaped by our experiences.
Biology impacts the decisions you make: how much sleep you get, when you last ate, and how stressed you are. Delay decisions until you are in better circumstances, or try to make sure you are in better circumstances in the first place. Put in constraints to stop yourself from making short-term decisions against your best interests.
I’ve definitely acted poorly due to lack of sleep before, and when I’m tired or stressed, it’s easy to go down the path of least resistance. It’s important to try to remember to prepare yourself for decisions and to delay decisions when you see fit.
What causes indecisiveness?
Bad habit. You don’t recognize that there is no such thing as making no decision so you keep delaying to avoid having to make one.
You don’t have the cognitive space. You are distracted by other decisions and need to make yourself sit down and focus on the high priority decisions.
When all your options are pretty similar value. Optimizing tiny differences is not a priority, so just flip a coin. If you are disappointed by the outcome of that coin toss, maybe that tells you that the options weren’t as similar as they seemed at the beginning.
Grief and other emotions. See the below quote from the course, the entirety of which really resonates with me:
“That is when all your options are bad options, what you should do is pick the least worst one. When you’ve done your homework and you’ve actually evaluated your options and you can see that this is the least worst one, please go with it, execute on it. What people do instead though, is they get emotional. They feel this grief, they feel upset that their best option is a pretty bad one, and they keep poking around in the information as if something new is going to magically materialize there. Well, when you’ve already done your homework and you know nothing new is going to materialize, please have the courage to execute, to move on. That said, you can still have your emotions and your grief. Just do it in parallel. “
As a historically indecisive person, I feel very seen. I appreciate how this explanation of indecision shows us how we can stop being indecisive. We can reduce distractions, process our emotions and separate them from the decision at hand, and if the options are similar in value, just flip a coin and see what happens.
A decision is not objective just because it uses data. The decision could be tainted with confirmation bias, which is when what you already believe influences how you perceive information.
Confirmation bias is everywhere. Be wary of confusing what you want to be true, what would be convenient if true, and what would be objectively true. As someone who has analyzed a lot of data for work over the past several years, I can see how this bias can influence people’s decisions. That’s why it’s important to follow the next piece of advice.
Know the answers to these questions:
“Is your mind set, if so, what is it set to?”
“What would it take to change your mind?”
Confirmation bias could result if you decide what would change your mind after you get all the information.
A decision that leads to worse outcomes than intended could still have been a good decision in terms of how it was made.
I’m guilty of judging my own decisions based on their outcomes, and apparently this type of bias, called outcome bias, is very common. Don’t fall for it! You can record what you knew at the time a decision was made and remember that that is the only information you can use to judge whether the decision was right.
Data (i.e. my job) is totally useless without decisions.
I’m a data engineer, and I made data available to people. I know it doesn’t have to lead to decisions right away, data can be useful for inspiration, too. But if someone doesn’t act on the data eventually, there wasn’t a use for it in the first place.
🚣🏻♀️
I’ve only scratched the surface of all Cassie Kozyrkov’s content out there. Ultimately, any advice she gives has to be taken in context, and she is just one person out of many people with opinions. I’m looking forward to reading more of her writing. It’s a special feeling when you find someone who has gained so much insight, who has written a ton, who emulates qualities you want to have yourself, and who is driven to help others find their way in their lives. It feels like having a hero.
I recommend reading her blog, and if you’re in the market for inspiration from other heroes, I recommend Flour and Milk Bar (they’re more than just recipes!), and Michelle Obama’s memoirs.