Satisficing Your Career?
When “satisficing†just won’t do
“Satisfice� It’s a word made up from “satisfy†and “suffice†and describes a solution found by trial and error, a solution that becomes the default way to achieve a result.
It’s often not the best solution, but it’s the one we use again and again. Why? Because it is a way we stumbled upon without help. We insist, “ Its MY solution. I love it because I don’t want to spend time learning something that might work better when I have something that works fine now. . . . Mostly.â€
We got the word from Herbert Simon, a physicist and Nobel laureate from Carnegie Mellon University. It’s the way most people use their computers, learn new software and figure out their cell phones. I learned Excel by satisficing; when I took a class I was amazed at how hard I had made simple calculations, using six keystrokes when I could do it in two. It was hard to unlearn my old ways, too. I knew what I was doing the other way, cumbersome though it was.
Satisficing isn’t bad. It’s sometimes all we need. But there are other solutions—ones that may be better, faster, easier, or provide satisfaction in additional ways. But moving away from satisficing becomes hard once we’ve become used to doing it “our†way. We integrate the satisficing into how we run our life. Habits are hard to dislodge, even if they are not in our best interests.
The Action
We satisfice in many ways. We do it in our lives when we choose a job because it pays for the mortgage and food bills and provides health insurance. It doesn’t fulfill the dreams we have about helping people, or about creating something, or about making a contribution to the world of learning. We stay in that job because it satisfices. Occasionally we think that we aren’t that job, but after a while, that job becomes what we do with our life. And when that nagging displeasure starts, we try to bury it by working harder.
The Traction
How are you satisficing in your life?
What is the ease of the satisficing you are doing?
What is the cost? (To your health, to your peace of mind, to your image of yourself)
Pick something that you used to love when you were younger—drawing with crayons, finger-painting, writing in your diary, playing the piano—and indulge yourself for half an hour in this pleasure. This is your private life, for you, not for anyone else. Don’t judge it, don’t try to make it into something. Just enjoy the moment, the smell of the crayon, the squish of the finger-paints, the secret thoughts in your diary.
You are not your job. You are so much more.
What can you do with that knowledge?
