In engineering, there is this rule of thumb about “one-way” versus “two-way” decisions. In a sentence: there are situations in which we can afford to experiment, fail, and roll back without much consequence beyond the time invested itself. These are two-way decisions. Other situations require much more scrutiny, because going back is not really feasible in context. These are one-way decisions.
This paradigm for decision-making was famously championed by Jeff Bezos in Amazon’s 2016 Letter to Shareholders. Many decisions are, in fact, of the two-way kind, he argues, and their (ir)reversible character affects who gets to decide, how fast an organization moves, and therefore how quickly it can innovate and grow. I recently saw it very well explained in this interview with Matteo Ferrando, a fal.ai engineer. The general wisdom says that we should try to identify two-way doors as much as we can.
But I stop here and wonder: the reversibility of decisions is something I’ve thought about in other contexts. A couple of years into college, there was this brilliant guy majoring in Electronic Engineering. In his free time, he would attend a classical mechanics course with us (physics majors) and solve the most intricate problems we could imagine. He was the best in the class without even being enrolled. Then, a big campaign started among physics students and professors to convince him to change majors. (The system we were in was not really designed for double majors, so choosing one path meant giving up the other.)
What I found to be the most compelling argument was given to him, in my presence, by a professor. In a sense, this argument also gave me some relief about whether my own decision to choose physics had been a good one. The argument went something like this: you enjoy both physics and electronic engineering. But if you choose physics, the effort you will need to make to do “some electronics” one day will probably be smaller than the effort you would need to make to do physics research if you follow the engineering path.
Put this way, it seemed he was choosing between a more reversible and a less reversible decision. I’d like to note that, while I generally agree with that statement, I do not mean to trivialize engineering as a simple byproduct of science, as they are two distinct areas of knowledge. I do believe, however, that because of the way physics is often taught (from first principles, from the ground up) there is some value in that training. A certain high transferability that I do not think is present in many other careers, at least not in the same way.
Admittedly, I am biased. In my experience, I have met many more physicists doing something else than people from other fields doing physics. That is, of course, not definitive proof of the argument. There are many other circumstances that affect this reality, like market dynamics, employment conditions, the structure of academia, and so on.
I think even big life decisions can benefit from this framing. We can ask ourselves: if I ever need to go back, will the time spent inside have been worth it? Will I walk an easier path afterwards?
At least in my case, that has been a very useful rule of thumb.