Boiling The Ocean

Wouldn’t it be great if we could reduce life to a simple set of equations? Well, if that idea is appealing you just might be in luck. Today’s episode of BTO is all about work and life equations. The conversation was prompted by a provocative post that Mike made recently about his formula for knowing when to leave a job. It was expressed, rather elegantly, as: Current job (joy - pain) < potential job (excitement - fear) There was more to it than that, but that notion - of reducing complicated considerations into symbolic equations - caught people’s imagination, and it prompted us to do a whole program about our favorite such algorithms. Here are just some of the ones we discuss on the show: - Happiness = pleasure + purpose over time (h/t to Paul Dolan) - Life Design Principles = Authenticity + Agency - “Happiness is wanting what you have, not getting what you want” (singer - and philosopher! - Sheryl Crow) We also break down why these simplifications are so appealing to us today. We all want formulas and algor