By Alexey Gavrilov on December 4, 2009

“Never underestimate the power of human stupidity” Robert A. Heinlein

You are smart. You know it. People around do notice. You must be doing great, but somehow you are not. You are stuck and not sure what to do. It’s probably time to be stupid. Let me bring up some well-known examples first.

1. Sergey and Larry launched yet another search engine in 1996. With no business model and the market apparently dominated by behemoths like Yahoo.
2. Andy wrote a check for $100,000 to the guys he barely knew, before they even had a company.
3. Stanford drop off Steve persuaded his friend Woz to build personal computers in a garage. Woz later said that “All the best things I did at Apple came from (a) not having money, (b) not having done it before ever.”

At the time, when it was happening, all that would be considered very stupid by most of us.

As heretic as it sounds you can’t avoid being stupid if you want to succeed. The Heinlein’s quote above might be deeper than most people think. I’m going to use a little computer science example to explain how it works.

Consider the problem. You want to accomplish your purpose in life. That could be anything, but let’s say you want to maximize the happiness accumulated over your lifetime (besides, what is your goal?). This in turn means a) you want to live long; b) you want to maximize your instant happiness at every point of time. To accomplish that you make numerous decisions every day – some big, some small but all contributing to what you get.
Happiness is a very complex thing but you still may consider it a function on the multidimensional space, which could be expressed as:

H = f(X1, X2, … Xn), where Xi is your decision and n is some very big number or even infinity and the exact shape of the function is unknown.

N-dimensional space is hard to visualize so let’s consider n=1, then the function could be plotted as a simple 2D graph.

[Picture 1. A shape of an f-function. It’s complex]

Along horizontal axis is the space of your possible options and along vertical one is the happiness.
Simply looking at the graph you can easily find the maximum and will know exactly what to do. Problem solved.

In the reality though, you can’t see the whole picture. All that is visible is a very little subset of options within your immediate reach:

[Picture 2. A shape of an f-function subset. It’s simplier]

Some people may see further than others but comparing to all possible options individual’s vision is very limited. Your background, education, a place, where you live and where you work, all contribute to that. If you are a Pink Floyd fan, you’ll recognize the barrier between white and gray areas as “the wall”.

Now what is the simplest algorithm to be happy? It’s smartness (or greed). Choose the best option, from what’s available and by incrementally improving, you’ll get to the top. That’ll work very well if f(x) would be a smooth one like this.

In reality chances are that very soon you’ll stop in the local maximum with no apparent direction to go further. You can easily recognize that feeling of lost direction. What would you do in that case?

First, you can try to extend your reach – for example, go for the additional education or trainings, join a community group etc. That’ll improve the situation quantitatively but qualitatively it’s still the same:

It’s interesting that your unconscious reach is much broader than the conscious one. Your brain accumulates more information than you can access on demand during logical thinking process. That’s why guts decisions, which you might not be able to explain rationally, in the most cases, work better than simple logic based on solid facts only.

What do you do if this is not enough?

That’s probably the time to jump i.e. act well beyond the reasonable limits and even beyond gut feelings, which you can rationalize. Quit a well-paid job to start your own business, relocate to the city you’ve never even visited before, enlist into the army, volunteer for the Red Cross etc. This is how it looks:

Everybody will think you are acting stupidly and so it is. However, that shouldn’t worry you much. Being stupid is the great way to unstuck. In fact most of the insanely successful people will tell you that some of the critical points of their life were not driven not by thoroughly planned actions but by some random events or irrational decisions.

The caveat is that you can fail miserably and fast. Then you should roll back and try again. That’s certainly a risk but staying in the local max could be a greater risk in the long term. The thing is that the picture is not static. It changes over time and if you don’t move, one day you might find the entire chart is tanking fast. Think real estate market as a recent example.

The idea I just described is a well-known algorithm called simulated annealing, which has been giving very good results, when applied to the problem of multi-dimensional global optimization. The name originates from the fact that the process is very similar to the one happening inside metal during annealing process, when the piece is first heated to high temperature and then slowly cooled down. On each step the algorithm combines the move in the direction of the maximum growth of the target function (the gradient) with the random jump. In order to make the process finish in finite time the magnitude of the jump component reduces with time (thus cooling down). Multiple runs are typically used as the random component of the algorithms makes the result of each run non-deterministic.

We only have one life so we can’t afford multiple runs. Other than that the algorithm should work for your life just as well as for optimizing design of nuclear power plant reactors.

1. Recognize, when you are stuck
2. Act, don’t wait – it rarely gets better on its own but often gets worse
3. Listen to your gut
4. Extend your reach, whenever you can
5. Don’t be afraid to act stupid
6. Don’t fixate in the familiar area – a random switch is often works much better
7. If it doesn’t work fail quickly. The difficult thing is to know, when to quit. If you follow #3 and #4 above that should help
8. Use “best in the world” test. Ask yourself – can I be the best in the world in what I do. If you answer “maybe”, “I don’t know”, “I can be at least good enough” – quit. (I believe this concept was first popularized by Seth Godin).