LSANKAR

'Optimizers, idealists, and adventurers' is a mental model for understanding how people structure their lives.

For those who aren't Munger disciples, I should clarify what I mean by 'mental model.' I don't mean a generalization whose rules are perfectly predictive all of the time. This isn't math. I mean a simple framework that is useful for understanding a facet of the world when considered alone that is useful for real decision making when combined with other mental models.

I should give credit where it's due; my thinking on this model came out of a conversation with Ray Cheng in late 2019. Ray stuck the model in my head.

The crux of the model is three dimensions on which people make decisions about how to spend their time. The dimensions aren't perfectly orthogonal, nor do they preclude one another. Maybe when the model settles more in my mind, I'll find a closer-to-orthogonal set of dimensions. Doesn't mean the model as I'm framing it isn't useful.

The optimizer dimension corresponds to the desire to improve one's own position. Decisions that are primarily focused on individual gain.

The idealist dimension corresponds to the desire to improve everyone's position. Decisions that are taken to help society or provide for others. There's a natural overlap with the optimizer dimension when we shrink the size of 'society'. For example, many people make decisions for the betterment of their families but to the detriment of their selves or society at large.

The adventurer dimension corresponds to the desire to experience new things. Decisions to exhilarate onself, explore unexplored frontiers, and create unique memories. There's also an overlap here with the optimizer dimension as this dimension is usually focused on self. But it doesn't always overlap; adventures undertaken are usually done knowing that they're not the best way to optimize. Another way to color the difference in optimizer and adventurer is the explore/exploit tradeoff. Although this doesn't perfectly capture what I mean here as adventuring might be me undertaken without personal gain in mind.

I bundle the desire for erudition in with adventurer and optimizer, but I can see how pulling it out could improve this model in the future. TBD on that.

When I have a difference in opinion with someone I know well about how to spend a weekend or plan a career, our differences can usually be traced to our relative positions in optimizer/idealist/adventurer space.

When it comes to describing an idea, I prefer describing the rules to describing examples. That's just how my mind works; perhaps a byproduct of studying physics for the first couple decades of my life. I'll stretch myself here to pull a few examples out. These are intentionally reductive; no one is so simplistic as any of these examples.

Consider the weekend warrior. Grinding for money/status during the week and climbing everest and doing tough mudders on the weekend. Probably an example of a optimizer/adventurer.

Or how about the tech-optimist venture capitalist. Who truly believes that technology makes the world better and wants to be an arbiter of that change. Maybe an optimizer/idealist.

And of course, there's the revolutionary. A path less traveled, sure, but if you had to put Che Guevara in this model, he'd probably be more idealist/adventurer than optimizer.

Again, extremely reductive; the model has only been useful to me when I've used a more nuanced cocktail of the three dimensions.