The frames I reach for when the path isn't obvious

In the summer of 2022 I took a half-year sabbatical from work. I didn’t plan it for long. I’d been at the same job for years and on paper the job was fine, but a quiet nagging had been building for months that I was in the wrong place, and at some point it got loud enough that I couldn’t ignore it anymore. I didn’t quit. I asked for a pause, with the understanding that the job would be there if I came back. That hedge was the whole reason I felt able to step away at all. I have never been able to make a high-uncertainty decision without leaving myself a way back to solid ground.

I spent that summer in Europe. I spent my birthday that fall in New York. I came back to Canada in the winter. I told myself I was figuring out what to do next, but most of the time I wasn’t figuring out much of anything. I was walking around new cities and waiting to see what would stop feeling wrong. Looking back now I can see clearly that my body knew what to do well before my head did. The decision to leave Montreal and move to New York to build my own community made sense in hindsight, but at the time it just felt like one small step in front of another with no map.

I’m still at that same job. I’m also building fikastay, and I’m writing this blog, and I’m slowly turning both of those into something I could one day stake more of my life on. It’s the same move as the sabbatical. Don’t bet everything on the new thing until the new thing has shown you it’s real. Give it long enough to have a chance. That hedge isn’t a side note to how I make hard decisions. It’s the part that makes the rest of what I’m about to write actually usable.

The Stoic dichotomy of control

The frame that’s been with me the longest is William B. Irvine’s tour through Stoic philosophy on Sam Harris’s Waking Up app, The Stoic Path. The whole tradition rests on one move. Look at any situation you’re worried about. Sort it into what’s in your control and what isn’t. Spend your energy only on the first column.

The specific tool I use most is what Irvine calls negative visualization. Sit for a moment with a clear picture of not having the thing you’re currently anxious about losing. The friendship. The apartment. The health. The work. The exercise is short and it isn’t pleasant, but it does two things at once. It softens the grip the fear has on you, because you’ve already met the bad outcome once on your own terms. And it turns whatever you currently have into something you can be grateful for, instead of something you take for granted while you scan the horizon for the next thing.

I lean on this frame most when I’m about to make a decision out of fear. When sloth Ikki, the part of me that wants the comfortable answer, starts arguing for the easy path because the hard one might cost me something I like. Negative visualization shows me that the cost is bearable. It also shows me that the version of my life where I didn’t make the hard call would be its own kind of loss, just slower and quieter.

Process over outcomes

The second frame is one I first met in Annie Duke’s Thinking in Bets, but the idea recurs across most of what I read on decisions. Duke calls the wrong move “resulting.” Resulting is judging the quality of a decision by the quality of the outcome. You made a good call, the result was bad, therefore the call was bad. Or worse, you made a bad call, you got lucky, and now you think you’ve figured something out.

A good decision-making process that produces a bad outcome is still a good process. I don’t need to correct it. I need to run it again next time and accept that some of the time the world will hand me a bad result for a good call. The corollary is harder. A bad process that happens to work once is still a bad process. The gambler who wins the first hand isn’t a good gambler. They’re a lucky one. If I can’t tell which I am, I’ll be miscalibrated on the next decision.

Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow sits next to this for me, as the layer underneath. Kahneman’s split between fast intuitive thinking and slow deliberate thinking gives me a vocabulary for noticing which mode I’m currently in, and whether the decision in front of me deserves the other one. Kahneman himself, in an interview I watched before he passed in 2024, acknowledged that some of the original research has aged less well than he hoped. I take the frame as a guide, not a rulebook. Most of my worst calls have been fast-mode answers to a slow-mode question. Most of my best ones have been the opposite: catching myself overthinking something my gut already knew.

Systems thinking and leverage points

The third frame is the one that took me the longest to actually digest. I was first exposed to systems thinking through my electrical and computer engineering education at the University of Toronto, but I didn’t really get it until I read Donella Meadows’ essay Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System. She lists twelve places you can push on a complex system to change its behavior, in increasing order of effectiveness. Numbers and parameters are the weakest. The goals of the system are near the top. The mindset the system grows out of is at the very top.

The lever I think about most in my own work is number three on her list, the goals of the system. Define what the system is actually for and a lot of other questions answer themselves. This is the same lesson Simon Sinek points at when he tells people to start with their why, except Meadows applies it at the level of organizations, products, economies, anything with parts that interact. It’s also the lever I most often see pushed in the wrong direction. A product whose stated goal is helping you stay close to the people you care about, but whose actual goal (the one the business needs) is keeping you on the app whether or not anyone you care about is on the other end, will inevitably drift toward the second goal. The stated goal can’t beat the structural one.

The other lever I work with deliberately is number six, the structure of information flows. Who knows what, and when. Most of the bad organizational dynamics I’ve seen at work trace back to someone hoarding context that someone else needed in order to do their job well. Most of the good ones came from leaders who made the information cheap to access on purpose, even when it was uncomfortable.

The thing Meadows comes back to throughout the essay is that leverage points are counterintuitive. People sense where they are, then push in the wrong direction. She cites Jay Forrester’s stories from MIT: corporations that had identified the right lever and were spending all their energy cranking it backwards. I see this in myself when I look at how I used to think about social media. My intuition was that I needed to use it more to feel connected, and when that didn’t work my intuition was that I needed to abandon it completely. Both intuitions were wrong. The actual lever was building something that served what I actually wanted from being online, instead of accepting the version someone else built for a different purpose.

Closing

I don’t reach for these frames every day. Most of the time I just do the next thing. But when I’m sitting with something that isn’t obvious, when the nagging feeling is back and I can’t yet tell what it’s pointing at, one or another of them usually helps. The Stoic dichotomy when I’m scared. Process-over-outcomes when I’m second-guessing a call that didn’t work. Leverage points when I can’t tell what part of a problem to push on.

Sometimes they fail. Sloth Ikki still wins some afternoons. I still result when I’m tired and want a tidy story for why something went wrong. The leverage points in my own life are still mostly counterintuitive on the first pass. The frames don’t make me right. They make me a little more honest about how I got to my answer, which over a long enough timeline turns out to matter more.

If any of these are useful to you, or if there are frames you reach for that I haven’t met yet, I’d love to hear from you.