notes #9: on the importance of search

If you look closely, a significant part of our lives is spent on one thing: searching.

You spend a large part of your youth searching for the right friends, the right career, and the right partner.

When the search goes well:

• We feel happy hanging out with the right people.

• We feel passionate about the work we do.

• We feel energetic and excited to get through the day.

But when the search takes too long, or in some cases fail, it feels like we’re wasting our time. We start to feel lost, depressed and even lonely.

For some of us, the search continues till middle-age, and for others, the search begins again even later as events unfold.

Search is so omnipresent in our lives that the biggest companies are built around search:

• Google: search for answers

• Meta: search for friends / people

• LinkedIn: search for work

• Amazon: search for items

The problem with search is that it’s not productive in a goal sense. That is, it doesn’t bring you closer to achieving your goals.

Searching for your passion or your life partner doesn’t contribute to the fulfilment from doing work you like, or building a stronger relationship with someone.

It’s a necessary but seemingly unproductive step. And so the goal is to make the search process as effective as possible.

So the question becomes: how should we go about searching?

Well, it depends on the goal and whether you have an idea of what you want.

• If you do, then searching mostly involves similarity matching, like asking a specific question on Google, or getting a recommendation from a friend, or looking at things with similar attributes to what you want.

• If you don’t, then searching is mostly trial and error — you do something, figure out whether you like it or not, then move on.

The problem with the latter is that it takes a crazy amount of time if you don’t find what you want quickly — and some of the effort there can feel like failure, or a sense of being trapped.

But the beauty of trial and error is this concept known as serendipity, where there’s a possibility for something magical to happen, like meeting someone you really like at a bar you just walk in.

The 37% Rule

The secretary problem models a scenario where an employer interviews a series of candidates sequentially in random order and must decide immediately after each interview whether to hire that candidate or not, without the possibility of returning to a previous candidate.

The objective is to devise a strategy that maximizes the probability of selecting the best candidate.

Mathematically, it has been proven that the optimal strategy is to reject the first 37% (specifically, 1/e, where e is the base of the natural logarithm, approximately equal to 2.718) of candidates and then select the next candidate who is better than all previous ones.

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As is always the case in real life, while the 37% rule provides some perspective into the challenges of searching, its usefulness is rather limited to problems with:

• Known total number of options

• Sequential and irrevocable decisions

• Single optimal choice

And as you probably know, life is not always so clear cut.

So what?

The purpose of today’s writing is to highlight the prevalence of search in our lives — something I didn’t appreciate before.

By understanding the nature of search, it can bring new perspectives to the things we do.

You’ll realise…

• That finding work that you really love is not a struggle, but a journey of search — a necessary evil.

• That feeling lost is not a state you are trapped in forever — it’s just that you’re still searching.

• That being unable to find a life partner doesn’t mean you are not lovable, but that maybe you have been going about the search process wrongly.

Naval Ravikant wrote that most of what we do in life is finding who or what needs us the most.

And while he said that in a predominantly business context, I think it’s very true in our personal lives as well.

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On GPT Search And with the prevalence of GPT revolutionising search, it will be helpful to understand the factors of what good search entails — as some people have mentioned before, an immediate answer from GPT may quicken the process, but it doesn’t mean the search has ended (or the answer has been found).

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Anyway, this has been on my mind recently and I wanted to write it down and share it with you.

There’s a huge rabbit hole about searching I want to explore further, and maybe I will write a book about it down the road…

Have a good one.

Cheers, Joesurf

💡 Inspiration of the Week

From The Almanack of Naval Ravikant by Eric Jorgenson

• "Earn with your mind, not your time.”

• "All the returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest."

• “Technology democratises consumption but consolidates production. The best person in the world at anything gets to do it for everyone.”

🧠 Weekly Notes

📖 Book [9/10] — The Almanack of Naval Ravikant by Eric Jorgenson

• Seek wealth, not money or status: Wealth is having assets that earn while you sleep; money is how we transfer time and wealth; status is your place in the social hierarchy.

• Embrace specific knowledge and leverage: Pursue your genuine curiosity and passion to build unique skills that cannot be easily replicated or automated. Leverage these skills through labor, capital, code, or media to achieve outsized returns.

• Happiness is a choice and a skill: Happiness is not about positive thoughts or negative thoughts; it's about the absence of desire. Understanding that happiness is a choice you make and a skill you develop can lead to a more fulfilling life.