A practical road map for decisions-that-matter.

The Story of Recalculating

My father always has the best advice. At age 14, I had a notes section in my cell phone where I would write down all the wise ideas my dad told me that helped guide me or get me through a hard time. He always seemed to have sage advice for any sort of problem that came up.

I became a sort of collector of such advice, not only from my father but from myriad sources I encountered. I would take these bits and pieces of great counsel and use them to advise my friends. They always were impressed with my wisdom, but I really give credit to all the wise people whose advice I acquired.

Inspired by this acquired wisdom, I developed a driving passion in high school and college to help people become better critical thinkers and problem solvers. I created a community outreach team in high school that helped underserved students learn a six-step critical thinking process. This process was taught as part of Future Problem Solving Program, a grade 4-12 program that stimulates critical and creative thinking skills. In college, I conducted academic research for 5 years on how to develop curriculum to help engineering students become better problem solvers and be better prepared to tackle the open-ended problems we see in the real world.

Every time I came home from a break at college, my father and I would go for a run. We would talk through different situations my friends were in and think about how their decision processes could be improved. There always was so much to learn from each situation. For example, my father taught me not to make a final decision until you have to, as you want to get the maximum amount of information to inform your decision-making process. This was key insight when making my graduate school decision, where I learned last-minute that the professor I wanted to work for didn’t have the funding that was anticipated, so it made more sense to start in industry. I started applying all the methodological critical thinking strategies I was learning to help bolster my own ability to make quicker, smarter long-term decisions.

On one of our runs, we came up with the idea of writing a book about all these decision-making ideas, to help people gain critical thinking skills in order to become better decision-makers.

So over the course of my last two years of college, we carved out time to interview top decision makers, those who would be considered “most improved” in their decision-making process, and people with unique stories that can help others gain insight into how to become a better decision-maker and critical thinker. Their stories taught us more about the process of leveraging critical thinking skills to mitigate risk, using skills/experiences to take advantage of opportunities, and the ratio of people planning their journey vs letting the course run its path. Their stories, bolstered by both personal and experience-based research, is the basis for “Recalculating.”