Thread by @theBuoyantMan

Almost all the decisions in life that I regret were taken under strong emotional influence.

Looking back, this is the one thing that stands out. Whether it's greed, anger, hatred, vengeance, or just exuberance, every regretful decision has been made with emotions.

We only think that it's an emotional decision if we are overtly angry or overtly happy. But that need not be the case. Hope is an emotion. Greed is an emotion. Fear, even slightly is an emotion. When you're standing on a fence, a small emotion can nudge you to either side.

So, when making decisions that usually require a lot of changes in your life, think it through and see if any hope, desire, greed, fear, etc., have crept into the decision making process.

For me, with my MS applications, I applied to colleges I considered superb to attend, and didn't apply to any others. I didn't hedge my bets. I didn't consider risks. I was greedy and had the desire to study at the best university possible and follow up with PhD.

Since the quality of labs and professor is important for PhD, I chose to apply to the universities with the best labs for Machine Learning with a focus on time-series, scalability and optimization of speed.

I hadn't published anything, but wrote of my prior research experience.

Stanford, Princeton, Alberta, UofT, McGill, UMontreal, ETH Zurich, UWisconsin, Georgia Tech, CMU, UMaryland were the colleges I applied to. I knew people studying the same program there who went with similar profiles as mine. So, I figured I had a decent shot.

Not really sure what went wrong, but I applied two years too late. I had the most desire to study at Princeton or ETH. Lack of IIT tag played a significant role in getting rejections. I got rejected by all 12 universities I applied to.

Looking back, the emotion that caused this was greed, desire, and hope. Everyone I knew who went to all these colleges with profiles similar to mine, went one or two years before me. The graduating bachelor's batch nationwide had advanced in these 2 years.

I let the greed to study in the best institutions prevent me from hedging my bets with 2-3 safe and medium universities. I could have applied to UMass, SJSU, Dartmouth, etc. I didn't. I was hell bent on time-series, statistical learning, and scope for PhD after MS.

Today, I wouldn't repeat that. Now, my thoughts about a PhD are different. I wouldn't do a PhD. I'd finish MS with some research work and join a company and work in a role that best offers a mix of research + engineering work, like Google's Research Software Engineer.

Knowing what I know currently, I'd go back and change things if I could. But, if you only have to go through the experience to know what you know currently, meaning you'll always be behind, how do you really take a decision with confidence that it's optimised enough to be right?

You do that by checking your decision-making pipeline for any seepage of emotions into it, leakage of logic out of it. Whenever you make decisions that require too many variables in your life to change, take this into account and make your moves appropriately.

In that application process, despite being University topper at VIT with a 9.4 gpa, a GRE score of 328 with 169 in quants, toefl score of 114, and having two research based projects, 2 years of work experience, etc., none of the colleges I applied to gave me a shot.

It's a hit or a miss. I probably had low-quality recommenders, or the one year entrepreneurship experience didn't sit well in the application. I went through a thousand combinations of things that led to the result.

But then I had an epiphany. When you take up something that is essentially largely outside of your locus of control, where your part is only 20%, remaining 80% isn't in your control, you have to significantly hedge your bets.

It's just like trading a 20% win rate strategy. Only that, you get only one strike. You have to bet all the money you got on that trade. 20% odds for you, 80% against you. What do you do? You try and find a way to hedge that risk of ruin any way you can.

If you don't hedge your bet with something like this where you have to spend a significant portion of 1 year on this process and the result can mean you have wasted 1 full year for nothing, you have to make sure you don't have nothing to show for at the end.

So, going forward, have this as part of your decision making framework. Check for emotion leakage and even slight, hidden, unrecognizable at a surface level kind of emotions leaking into the decision making process, and then proceed cautiously.