Should you do something that will change you forever?
Get married, have kids, become a vampire? Once it’s done, nothing will stay be the same. And you can’t go back.
How can you assess that decision before making the fateful step?
The book is great at laying out the dichotomy between wild problems and tame problems. A simple cost benefit analysis is fine for figuring out the best method to get your stuff to New York.
But should you move to NYC? That’s a wild problem.
Wild problems are challenging because they ask what you want to become. Wild problems probe your dreams.
Unfortunately, defining the question is much easier than finding the answers. Plumb your core values and hold fast to them. View your life within the context of your relationships and community. (In podcasts Roberts admits that he has transitioned from an economic libertarian towards a temperamentally conservative worldview.)
Fundamentally, you just won’t know what your future altered self will judge the results. It can go well — it can go horribly. At some point, you make a leap of faith. But stay flexible and adjust in mid flight.
Fortunately one doesn’t come across many wild problems. Hopefully most of them are in my past…but the kids have all theirs in the future.
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I shouldn’t get too cocky, the gods love to throw wild problems at fools who have settled into comfortable circumstances.