life is like a box of.. binary trees

note that this is not technical

One thing I always find interesting about life is that we never know what we’re going to face (like the famous quote Life is like a box of chocolates). Each time I grab these chocolates I have to make decisions, from trivial to impactful, over and over again. Just as every choice in a game determines the ending, we keep navigating toward our unique ending, uncertain about each choice along the way - it’s pretty fun if you view in this way - although ik at the moment is quite frustrated

I recently went through the most chaotic time in the last two years (probably). I had lots of important/impactful decisions to make and thoughts to process. At some point, I felt overwhelmed by the undefined possibilities of each decision. Sometimes I worried I maybe overthinking, and other times I worried I maybe wasn’t thinking enough.

A helpful mental model I used during this period and pretty much many cases like this was a binary tree. I think it’s a great model to combine intuition and logic effectively for decision-making that don’t allow second thought:

        A
       / \
      B   C
     / \   \
    D   E   F

So, D, E, and F are the potential options, while A, B, and C represent the question set that can be answered in a binary format.

Although many questions are hard to answer in binary terms, forcing them into this format can help you choose one option. At the end of the day, every decision is binary anyway lol — either you do it or you don’t. This part is based on logical thinking.

However, how you assign the questions to A, B, and C — especially given their hierarchy — should follow your intuition. Assign the questions based on the values you consider most important or have a more overarching scale, etc.

I’m pretty amazed by how clean and straightforward the decisions I made using this binary tree model were, with basically no room for second-guessing.