A summer intern candidate reminded me of a very important fact during our interview. After covering algorithms, data structures, and a bunch of helpful life heuristics, he simply said - “These are only useful if they don’t cloud your mind.”

Instantly, I recalled how, before I got into these decision making heuristics, I seemed to have a clearer mind in some situations. As it goes, the model is only useful if it eases your life. Many times, adding all of these heuristics makes you try to project them onto the real world, often at the expense of trusting your evolutionary instinct. A decision you might have naturally arrived at in the subconscious now took 10x as long trying to run it through the proper matrix.