On Commitment & Optionality
our commitment crisis, why optionality is overrated, and why conviction might be the antidote
Over the last several months I’ve had multiple conversations with friends about commitment, conviction, and optionality. Those conversations led to this Twitter thread and now this essay.
The Commitment Crisis
I believe my generation is facing a crisis of commitment. This crisis is especially endemic amongst the young and ambitious.
In an age of infinite optionality, we lack the ability to commit to damn near anything — jumping from trend to trend, city to city, hookup to hookup, company to company — seems to be the norm.
This unprecedented optionality is rooted in abundance, specifically the abundance created by decades of industrial revolution, globalization, and the internet.
Don’t get me wrong. Optionality is not innately bad. For most of human history, we had little in the way of choice. Dinner was dictated by what you could hunt or farm. Dating by who lived in your town or village. Vocation by what your parents did.
Today, those of us fortunate enough to be living in developed economies have more choices than ever over what we consume, who we build relationships with, and the careers we pursue.
Options are good. It gives us agency over who we become.
The downsides are that many of us feel anxious, indecisive, and confused about what we should do with our lives amidst a sea of choice.
Optionality Collecting
Rather than commit to a path, many of us hedge our bets, making decisions that allow us to collect more options, more choices, and more potential futures.
For example, let’s look at two of the most popular career paths pursued by ambitious grads of elite schools — Investment Banking and Management Consulting.
Harvard professor Mihir Desai gives a great overview of the appeal of these jobs in his essay The Trouble with Optionality.
For new graduates, working at a consulting firm creates optionality because of the broad exposures (to industries and companies) and skills these firms purportedly develop. Going to graduate school creates optionality by enabling more opportunities than a narrow professional trajectory can provide. Working at prestigious firms and developing social networks are similarly viewed as enabling more choices and more optionality. And of course, the more optionality, the better.
In contrast, the closing of doors and possibilities signals the loss of optionality. This language doesn’t only apply to career planning: Don’t be surprised to hear someone in finance talk about marriage as the death of optionality.
He goes on to game out a typical trajectory for these grads.
The Yale undergraduate goes to work at McKinsey for two years, then comes to Harvard Business School, then graduates and goes to work Goldman Sachs and leaves after several years to work at Blackstone. Optionality abounds!
In tech, venture capital has become one of the most sought-after jobs for many young ambitious folks.
Venture is attractive because the potential “exit options” abound. You could stay in VC, start a company, join a startup, etc.
This isn’t isolated to Gen-Z VCs though. Many in tech work themselves ragged juggling a dozen different things at once, often doing none of them particularly well. My friend Yoni encapsulates this in his essay Against Optionality.
The tech ideal of being a bi-coastal, sexually-unmoored IC with a paid newsletter and a scout fund is fundamentally about optionality and flexibility.1 Total freedom with fallback options and alternatives aplenty. That desire for optionality and flexibility is a reflection of the belief that there might, at some point in the near future, be something/someone better to do/be.
Tech folks are primed to love optionality because in tech the outlier outcomes are so much better than the rest. The upper bound of possibility is so lucrative and fantastic (joining a company that goes public and mints you millions practically overnight, for example) that it’s so obviously worth it to continuously optimize around that.
In an industry where the majority of the spoils go to a small number of winners, we’re all trying not to miss out on the next big thing, the next wave to ride, the next great company or idea.
Again, having choices is a good thing. There’s value in trying different paths, learning about yourself, and creating optionality before going all-in.
My issue is that many of us never commit. We keep collecting more options, more choices, more potential futures — to do what? What’s the end game? At what point do we convert these options into something real?
Why do we chase optionality?
While there are many reasons we optimize for more potential futures, I believe the root issue is that we lack conviction. We have no point of view.
I believe this is because we’ve outsourced our taste-making to algorithms, influencers, external tools, our social circles, etc. My Twitter friend Katie Chiou explores this in her essay hell is the absence of taste.
Rather than undergo painstaking research or close observation, I can flit through a personal, algorithmic feed or listen to a Spotify-curated playlist, like reading the SparkNotes analysis of a book in order to understand it.
I don’t mean this to say that I think people literally don’t have preferences, but I do think we have lost the ability to probe what resonates, lost the vocabulary to describe what touches us in the parts of our souls we have yet to bare.
Developing authentic taste is manual labor. It’s reflection, searching, truth-seeking, and refining. Outsourcing taste is the death of creativity, of interestingness. It’s the road to becoming an NPC, a cog in the machine.
Without taste, you won’t develop a point of view. Without a point of view, you won’t develop conviction. Without conviction, you won’t have the confidence, the belief, to commit.
Conviction
Conviction is the key to commitment. It’s what fuels you to make a dent in the world.
If you’re trapped in the optionality cycle, if you want to stop collecting options and start making commitments, developing conviction is the obstacle that blocks your path. It’s what stands between you and the deep commitment you crave in the depths of your soul.
The road to commitment starts with building conviction.
In a future essay, I plan to explore the process of building conviction in more depth. If anything resonated and/or you have perspectives you’d like to share, DM me on Twitter.
We’re all building on the conviction of others. My thinking on this topic has been inspired by my own experiences, conversations with friends, and the work of others I respect. Special thank you to my friends Ben Laufer, Minn Kim, Vicky Han, Erik de Stefanis, and Safi Aziz for perspectives and feedback on this essay.
Been waiting for this piece