Design Your Own Life

Nick Epley handed us bid points and a choice that was supposed to be about ethics and turned out to be about mirrors. It was the summer of 2022. The world had just reopened after the pandemic, and I was enrolled in the Chicago Booth MBA programme, sitting in Harper Center on the University of Chicago campus in a classroom of executives: division heads, founders, people already carrying P&Ls, the youngest among us in their late thirties, nobody pretending this was a gap year. Between quarterly reviews and succession conversations everyone was still treating as optional, we took his course Designing a Good Life and played the investor version of steal-or-split: one student as capital, one as adviser, a pot of fake money, reputations on the line in a room that smelled of coffee and deferred panic. I remember the awkward pause before anyone moved, the way laughter came too loud when someone chose steal, and the quieter relief when a pair split and both walked away with something. The game was rigged to teach reputation, not returns. booth-magazine I chose split when steal would have cleared the pot and told myself it was strategic. Humans crave formulas for the same reason we crave answer keys: they promise that somewhere there is one correct sheet and your job is to copy it cleanly. Scott Galloway delivered a brilliant one in The Algebra of Happiness, which he later taught as a packed Stern elective. galloway That summer I was reading Galloway's ratios on the cab ride into Hyde Park and running Epley's exercises in Harper Center. Two professors, two instruments, same hunger. The error is not reading either of them. The error is treating their variables as yours.

The Answer Key Is Someone Else's Variables

Galloway's algebra is explicit enough to audit if you stop treating it as inspiration quotes. Richness is a ratio: income divided by expenses, so someone on a smaller pay cheque who lives below their means can be "richer" than a high earner bleeding cash. Success, in his ratios, favours hours spent sweating and creating over hours spent watching; resilience over a spotless failure record. Happiness is the frustration term: the gap between what you want and what is. Serendipity is a function of courage multiplied by attempts, which is his way of saying rejection tolerance is not a personality ornament but a variable in the equation. Relationships compound like capital when you make small, consistent deposits rather than grand gestures followed by silence.

Formula merchants benefit when one answer key scales. Authors, course sellers, prestige programmes: all of them have an incentive to imply that the same set of priority dials works for every human in the cohort. Podcast algebra travels faster than introspection. I am not anti-formula. Cognitive offload is a feature when you are exhausted. The invoice arrives later, when you hit every target on someone else's spreadsheet and the life still feels wrong. You checked every box the formula names. You feel ungrateful anyway, as though you failed a test you never designed. That resentment is data. It means you optimised with someone else's weights.

That copy-paste gets a push from the self-help shelf and the podcast feed: gurus and productivity experts monetise confident simplification because clarity clips better than caveats. Kruger and Dunning showed in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1999 that people with the least skill in a domain often overestimate their competence. Life design has almost no tight feedback loop to correct the mistake. kruger-dunning You mistake fluency for mastery when someone narrates your trade-offs between ad reads. Galloway and Epley publish frameworks you can audit against a life; the economy around them rewards frameworks you can retweet before breakfast.

Two Formulas, One Missing Variable

Galloway's method is anecdotal algebra: ratios distilled from one life, packaged for strivers who want something scannable before the next quarterly review. Epley's method is behavioural experiment: classroom exercises that collect data on kindness, gratitude, and social forecasting errors you can actually inspect. Galloway hands you candidate inputs: richness as a ratio, frustration as want minus is, serendipity as courage times attempts, relationships that compound when deposits are small and consistent. Epley hands you audit tools: steal/split before real money is at stake, gratitude letters that force you to name a debt without networking it, kindness assignments that produce measurable affect. His later work on undersociality shows we systematically underestimate the return on reaching out because we misforecast awkwardness. epley-book The failure modes are complementary, not contradictory: Galloway assumes you will not make the deposit; Epley shows you often will not because you expect the conversation to land worse than it does.

Gap math is diagnostic; design is the lever. Galloway's frustration term tells you want and is have diverged. Epley's ethics-as-design framing shows that being good and feeling good align when you architect for pro-sociality — but neither professor assigns your importance weights. Prestige scoreboards are badly designed systems that make good people optimise lagging variables while ignoring levers they could move today. Serendipity is not volume alone: courage multiplied by attempts still needs calibrated expectations, not blind repetition. Galloway hands you the spreadsheet. Epley hands you the lab notebook. Neither hands you the dials. Sovereignty is setting your own weights — using Galloway to name the variables worth caring about and Epley to test whether your environment and your forecasts are lying to you.

Name the Variables. Assign the Weights.

Your life score is not one number from heaven. It is closer to a weighted mix: how much you have of each thing you care about, multiplied by how much you care about it, then added up. Career times how important career is to you. Sleep times how important rest is. Friendships times how important people are. Economists write this life formula as U(x₁, x₂, …) with weights β₁, β₂, … — β is just the dial: how much that ingredient counts in your mix. Galloway's richness ratio is two ingredients with his dials already turned. The problem is copying his dials. His serendipity term is attempt frequency times a courage weight. His relationship compound interest is a reminder that some variables have returns that only show up on a long horizon.

Person A might rank career importance at nine and friendships at three. Person B might set career at four and friendships at nine. Same job title, different life score — because the weights differ, not because one person is better at life. mit-gruber Herbert Simon argued in the 1950s that humans satisfice rather than maximise: bounded rationality means you cannot optimise every input, so rational agents accept "good enough" on secondary levers while protecting the few that matter. simon You will not max family presence, revenue, creative output, and recovery sleep in the same fortnight. Simon gives you permission to stop pretending otherwise. Richard Ryan and Edward Deci's self-determination theory adds candidate inputs with evidence behind them: autonomy, competence, and relatedness function as fundamental needs, even though your personal weights on each still differ. ryan-deci There are no wrong formulas in the abstract. There are only misaligned weights for the chapter you are actually living, and the work of naming inputs is less shareable than a quote card.

Independent Levers, Lagging Scores

Some variables are closer to levers. Sleep, boundaries, deliberate practice, the habit of reaching out: independent in the sense that you can move them without waiting for permission. Others are lagging and noisy: validation, prestige titles, the warmth of a room when you say where you work. The post-MBA scoreboard sold me a bundled life formula: brand-name employer, compensation band, visible succession path. The scoreboard was legible to strangers. It was also incomplete.

Laurie Santos's Yale course The Science of Well-Being popularised miswanting: we systematically mis-predict what will improve life because we adapt to salary bumps, car upgrades, and even partnership milestones faster than we expect. santos The audit question is blunt: which of your current targets are lagging scores you cannot lever directly, and which are habits you keep deferring because they do not photograph well? Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton showed in Happy Money that how you spend often beats how much you earn for subjective well-being: experiences and prosocial giving tend to be spending that actually moves your score. dunn-norton Daniel Kahneman separated the experiencing self from the remembering self in Thinking, Fast and Slow: you can optimise a life that photographs well for LinkedIn while the Tuesdays actually lived feel thin. kahneman Richard Easterlin's paradox, first argued in 1974, suggests income-happiness correlations plateau within societies over time: more zeros on the spreadsheet do not automatically move the frustration term. easterlin Prestige scoreboards treat income as the main input. The literature keeps finding that alignment matters more than the integer.

You Cannot Peak Every Lift in the Same Week

"Have it all" is a programming error. It asks you to max every variable in the same period: career peak, family presence, aesthetic body, vibrant friendship group, side income, creative opus, perfect sleep. Biology and twenty-four hours are the constraints that do not negotiate. The rational move is not try harder. It is ruthless elimination of inputs that barely count for this season, and honest trade-offs on the rest.

Strength coaches run periodisation because you cannot personal-record your squat, your marathon time, and your sprint on the same Monday. Hypertrophy blocks give way to strength blocks, then deload weeks where the point is recovery, not heroics. The programme feels wrong only if you confuse a deload with failure. Sovereignty, in this frame, is scheduling which variable gets the mesocycle: a quarter where craft depth leads, a quarter where revenue leads, a quarter where repair leads. Life brochures rarely print the deload. Ed Diener and Martin Seligman reported in Psychological Science in 2002 that people in the top decile of happiness are disproportionately social: rich relationships show up as a distinguishing input, not a nice-to-have after prestige is secured. diener-seligman Most inherited scoreboards under-weight that variable because it is hard to put on a CV.

Refactor Between Chapters

The life formula that fit at thirty-five will suffocate at fifty-five if you never refactor. Wharton Knowledge has framed career, family, and time as chapter problems: maximise within the season you are in, not across every season at once. wharton Philip Brickman and Donald T. Campbell coined hedonic relativism in a 1971 chapter: the want/is gap resets because humans normalise new levels of stimulation. brickman-campbell Laurie A. Paul argued in Transformative Experience that major choices (parenthood, partnership, vocation) are epistemically special: you cannot know the self who will evaluate the outcome, so revelation value matters as much as expected utility. paul

Oliver Burkeman's Four Thousand Weeks treats finite lifespan as the binding constraint productivity culture keeps pretending away. burkeman Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein showed in Nudge that environment design shapes behaviour as much as willpower sermons. nudge Martin Seligman's PERMA model (positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, accomplishment) works better as a refactor checklist than a prescription: name the variables, then assign your weights. perma Refactoring is not betrayal of your earlier self. It is maintenance on the system that earlier self built with incomplete data.

I Optimised the Scoreboard Recruiters Could Audit

Inherited success metrics had stopped matching my felt life score by midsummer. Title, compensation, prestige: the variables recruiters and boards could audit on a single page. Unstructured time with people who knew me before the MBA was the variable I kept deleting from the model because it did not fit the template. The gratitude letter exercise was awkward in the way honest things are awkward when you already have a reputation to protect: you had to name a debt without turning it into networking. The kindness assignments produced data that was harder to spin than a cocktail reception. Classmates delivered flowers, bought strangers coffee, carried packages for people who would never know their title. booth-faculty

A classmate I will call Rafael optimised the visible scoreboard aggressively: the board-visible promotion, the succession path everyone in the room could name, sleep sacrificed without comment. He treated friendships as noise he was not counting. I optimised alongside him and called it ambition — same scoreboard, same sweat-versus-watch ratios Galloway had made legible, none of the weights I was supposed to be setting myself. Rafael got the line on his CV and the burnout in his body. I got clarity I did not want to pay for: that I had been treating Booth as a placement office for someone else's priority dials rather than a lab to redesign my own. The exercises had given us data on kindness and gratitude. I filed it under "soft skills" and returned to the scoreboard recruiters could audit. Rafael did not get the next decade back with corrected weights. He got the same Tuesdays I kept trading away, except he did not have a summer elective that treated kindness as data before the promotion clock ran out to tell him the trade was optional until the bill arrived.

The Strongest Case for Borrowing an Equation

Let me give the objection its fairest hearing, because borrowed algebra saves lives when bandwidth is scarce. Galloway distilled decades of pattern recognition into ratios a tired operator can remember on a commute. Epley distilled decades of experiments into exercises that change affect without claiming one set of priority dials fits every cohort. Laurie Santos's material is not vibes: a 2021 PLOS ONE evaluation of Yale's Science of Well-Being course found improved student well-being across multiple cohorts. yaden-rct Sonja Lyubomirsky, Kennon Sheldon, and David Schkade argued in Review of General Psychology in 2005 that intentional activities account for a substantial slice of happiness variance in their model, which is why "rewirements" are not astrology. lyubomirsky Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough's gratitude journaling experiments showed measurable affect gains over weeks, not just seminar applause. emmons If you are drowning, grabbing a proven heuristic is rational. A shared answer key beats reinventing nutrition from first principles while you are starving.

The limit is not that formulas exist. It is that life's biggest decisions are not small-world maximisation problems. Laurie A. Paul showed you cannot calculate utility for a self you have not yet become. Shahar Hechtlinger, Christin Schulze, Christina Leuker, and Ralph Hertwig argued in the American Psychologist in 2024 that transformative choices break expected-utility maximisation because selves change, experiential values are uncertain, and irreversibility makes the spreadsheet lie. hechtlinger Galloway's book is an anecdotal pattern library, not a finished recipe for your dials. Epley's exercises are empirical probes, not a finished life formula. Borrow both frames. Run the audits that survive your chapter. Then set your own weights and schedule the refactor when the season turns.

Borrowed algebra is a starting prescription, not your finished lens. Audit which variables you inherited from institutions that will not sit with you when you miss them. Rafael is in therapy and off the succession path he optimised for across two decades, because the equation he copied never included the Tuesday he needed and kept deleting.