Optionality
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At the most rudimentary level, optionality is having a lot of options.
Let’s say in today’s world you want to have a healthy level of optionality in your career.
What domain would you pick?
Would it be to become a programmer or a librarian?
While there is nothing wrong with being a career librarian, there is a significant gap between the quality of opportunities for growth with this career path compared to more viable ones like being a programmer.
The world is unpredictable, especially one where technology and social landscapes move so quickly. So it is in your best interest to pursue something that will have a diverse set of opportunities you can take advantage of.
Qualifying Options
Not all options are the same.
In fact, there are a few options that will help you significantly more than others.
The most important factor to consider while evaluating options is the upside of a win and the downside of a loss.
Let’s go back to the programmer vs librarian analogy; If you learn programming at the age of 30, the upside is that your skills will be in demand, you can create products for your own business, have better negotiating leverage with potential collaborators etc. While the downside/worst case scenario would be you wasting the 60-80 hours you spent learning the basics of coding.
This skill has a tremendous upside and a really small downside.
On the other hand, if you are pursuing the librarian path, your upside is you becoming a librarian and likely progressing within that domain for the rest of your career. The downside would be the small pool of available librarian jobs, low wages, little to no leverage in the market, dwindling domain growth etc.
This skill has a small upside and a massive downside.
So if you were to choose a skill/option to pursue, the sensible thing to do will be to go with programming.
Preserving Optionality
Preserving optionality is a strategy of keeping options open and fluid, fighting the urge to make choices too soon, before all of the uncertainties have been resolved.
Let’s say you are at a point in your career where you want to switch jobs.
When do you believe it is the right time to give your notice?
You can either choose to give your notice when you first feel like you no longer want to be at the said job or give your notice when you find a good job with better pay.
And like most things there are degrees to which you can deal with uncertainty.
Case 1: You give your notice as soon as you feel like it.
Outcome: You are in a desperate position to get a job since your income stream will stop in the near future if you don’t. You are more likely to take a bad job with the same pay or even worse a bad job with lower pay.
Case 2: You give your notice when you get your first offer that matches your current pay and workplace amenities.
Outcome: You are in a position where you feel safe because there is the stability of an offer and you know that your finances are not going to be in disarray anytime soon. You can now start applying for better jobs.
Case 3: You give your notice when you’ve got multiple offers with better pay.
Outcome: You are in a position where you have some leverage. You now have a better paying job that is guaranteed, so you can either choose to give the notice and move to your new job or hunt for an even better offer.
And with this leverage you can now ask for salaries and perks that you wouldn’t normally ask simply because even in the worst case scenario you have a better paying job offer.
Case 1 to Case 3, the leverage you have progressively increases because you waited till you had the most preferable options in front of you with most variables eliminated.
So it is in your best interest to make your most important decisions when you have eliminated as many variables as you can out of a situation.
So that’s it for today’s edition.
I’ll be writing more about optionality in future editions. So keep an eye out for that.
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