How do you know whether to settle?

If you are fortunate enough to catch two birds in the bush, you will be glad you left the bird in hand.

Hello guys,

Hope you are doing well. I’m okay, Alhamdulillah.

First, Ramadan Mubarak to all the fasting Muslims! May Almighty Allah accept our prayers and actions in this blessed month. It’s amazing that we’re six days in already, 2021 is moving super quickly. We movee.

** side note: I feel quite a bit scattered today, and it is inevitable that your reading experience - sequence, storytelling, takeaways - might be a bit off. E ba wa manage e.

Yesterday after realizing I had moved apartments since our last conversation, FK asked me, ‘Hameed, how many times have you moved in the past year?’

‘Four’

‘Wow’

Before you ask, no, I am not a serial killer running from the police. 😂😂

A multitude of factors (some expected and some not) have made me quite mobile in the last few months. Everything is a learning opportunity and for the most part, I am grateful for it.

You see, one of the major reasons I moved (two times) was because of some combination of discontent and optimizing for better. The first time, nothing was wrong with my apartment but I believed (rightly so!) that I could get a better place. And when the opportunity to move came, I took it. It was a great decision.

Fast forward a couple of months, and I had arrived at a new apartment for completely different reasons. Almost right away, I didn’t like it. The most obvious reason is that it was small - much smaller than I was used to. I could live in a small place, but that was not the only problem.

You know how sometimes you don’t like something but can’t really say why? It was like that for me. I just didn’t feel 100% comfortable. And so the very next day after moving in, I began my housing search again. Sure enough, I moved out shortly after and found a great place, Alhamdulillah.

Why am I telling you this?

Sometime last year, a friend sent me a verse of the Qur’an. She said she thought it was something I would like.

…كُنتُمْ خَيْرَ أُمَّةٍ أُخْرِجَتْ لِلنَّاسِ تَأْمُرُونَ بِٱلْمَعْرُوفِ وَتَنْهَوْنَ عَنِ ٱلْمُنكَرِ وَتُؤْمِنُونَ بِٱللَّهِ

‘You are the best community ever raised for humanity—you encourage good, forbid evil, and believe in Allah…’ - 3:110

She was absolutely right. You see, I liked the verse so much that it was actually pasted on my bedroom wall. (Four bedroom walls ago 😄)

If there’s anything I live by, it is a healthy striving for perfection. As one of my ethos is a quranic verse that literally tells me I am ‘the best’, then the best is all I desire. I have never been keen to ‘settle’.

Why should I earn a salary by trading my time for company A if company B provides more ‘value’? Why commit to spending a future with person A if person B provides a ‘better fit’? Why live in apartment A if apartment B is so much better and within reach? Why eat Amala when I can eat beans and dodo? (Ibadan people, I said what I said 🤪)

I do not pretend that a permanent obsession with perfection is always the best way to live. Many times, it is stressful and will leave you frustrated. But if you are fortunate enough to catch two birds in the bush, you will be glad you left the bird in hand.

What I do advocate for is a healthy striving for perfection. What does this mean for me, Abdul-Hameed?

It means I have learnt to strive for what is attainable, but always know when to settle.

Again, what does this mean?

There are many ways to determine what is the ‘best company’ to work for. You might decide to evaluate companies by salary, work-life balance, learning & personal development, career progression, opportunity for impact, fun, ati bee be lo.

It is extremely unlikely that the same company will come out tops in all categories. Industries like Investment Banking or Consulting might offer decent salaries and career progression, but their work-life balance leaves a lot to be desired. Building a startup might be fun and with a huge opportunity for impact, but the salaries are meh and career progression is not guaranteed.

Similarly, when choosing a partner, it is extremely unlikely that you find a highly motivated career person, an ever-present and attentive parent, an amazing level of Deen, Prophet Yusuf (Joseph) level physical attractiveness, emotional compatibility, a 10/10 family, and Faaji Alhaji/Alhaja financial comfort in one person. Something has to give!

So if you spend some time searching for perfection in any of these examples, you will quickly realize your efforts are futile. My personal hack is to identify which of the criteria are most important to you, and then max them out as much as possible. You may decide that learning & development is super important in a job at this stage, and you shall not settle until you are somewhat comfortable with the job's rating of that criteria.

So if you receive an offer for a job with a 50% rating on learning and development?

Nope.

60%?

Nope.

85%?

More like it.

This is what I mean by a healthy striving for perfection. It is being ever keen to maximize value and achieve the ‘best’, but wise enough to know when to be content.

It is not always easy to optimize your decision making in this way, as popular opinion will many times disagree with your choices. I try to remind myself that my evaluation criteria are different from everybody else’s and pray/hope things work out anyway.

Sometimes I will get it wrong, and sometimes I will get it right. But every time, I learn something new.

There was one other thing I learnt during my last move.

It was after going house-hunting to look at an available apartment. Trying to optimize my decision making as usual, I made a list of pros and cons of the new place over the old place.

It was a stalemate - I had 5 reasons to move and 5 reasons not to move. I decided to go ahead anyway. I suspect that a lot of decisions in life will bring much of the same, with data x research x analysis leading to an impasse.

Because no matter how much research company A does before acquiring company B, they will still find unpleasant things they did not know existed until after the merger. And no matter how long a couple dates, I suspect they will realize post-marriage that they barely knew each other.

Ultimately, high-impact decision making also requires some unique combination of gut feelings and balls of steel.

First, are you in tune with your emotions? After consuming all the data, does your gut say this is the right choice?

And then, can you bring yourself to pull the trigger? Many times we identify opportunities, investments, people, or whatever else that the data x our gut says would be nice to be a part of. But we often delay, ignore, and postpone because we are just not willing to take the risk.

And then the opportunities disappear.

Pull the trigger today.

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A few weeks ago, I watched an interview of Sir Alex Ferguson by Stanford Graduate School of Business, and it delighted me so much. A huge fan of both Sir Alex and the GSB, it was 45 minutes of heaven for me.

Photo by Stace Geiken from Stanford GSB

There are one or two things from the interview that still play in my head.

On The Future

‘Any game for me lasts about half an hour, and then I’m thinking about the next game.’

Many young people (myself included) are permanently thinking about the future.

‘After this, we’ll do xyz.’

‘Let’s start planning it from now.’

‘So what next after this?’

For me, I can’t quite help it. It’s bad enough that I’m often reminded to take things easy and live in the moment. I even have a to-do list saved in my notes for whenever next I’m on holiday! 😂

Finding out Sir Alex is quite similar was heartwarming for me. I also remember Jeff Bezos once said (paraphrasing),

‘I have the best job in the world because I’m always in the future. I’m permanently thinking about business and technology trends in 10 or 15 years from now. I hate being in the present. Because when I’m dragged into the present, it means there’s a fire that needs to be put out.’

On Ronaldo

‘Ronaldo was the best practiser I have ever known. He practised and practised and practised.’

When evaluating talent, observers generally fall into two camps - the ‘Born With It’ camp, which believes people achieve success because genetics made them so much better than everyone else, and the ‘Leaders Are Made’ camp, which believes anybody can achieve anything with hard work and intense effort.

While there are other camps, these two are the most prominent. I tend to be in the latter group. I genuinely believe anybody who works hard enough and has a little good fortune will get their 15 minutes in the sun.

** side note: I have more extensive thoughts on this and will make it the topic of a newsletter soon in sha Allah.

While I do not discount the fact that family background and natural disposition have a significant effect on early-stage development, I believe the hard work effect makes all the difference in the long term.

As people say,

‘Hard work will always beat talent if talent does not work hard.’

Have a great week. ✨

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Breaking regular format to remind you to subscribe x share.

Olohun a gbadura wa.

Hameed

** Jara content:

The American Psychological Association once invited William James to give a talk on the first 50 years of psychology research.

He simply said: “People, by and large, become what they think of themselves.”

Then, he left.