Rehearsing possible lives
A method actor's approach to decision-making
For those of us immersed in tech and business, we've developed an impressive arsenal of frameworks and mental models—each one a carefully crafted instrument in our decision-making orchestra. Charlie Munger's mental models, Shane Parrish's frameworks, Nassim Taleb's heuristics, the rationalist wisdom from the Less Wrong community—they all promise to help us optimize, maximize, and quantify, as if the perfect decision-making formula is always just one framework away.
The distance between knowing and becoming haunts our most consequential choices. This is why even the most sophisticated causal decision theories falter when our choices intertwine with others' predictions of our behavior, leaving us trapped in suboptimal equilibria, like rational agents unable to cooperate in the Prisoner's Dilemma.
There exists another school of decision-making —one that operates not through the cold machinery of frameworks and analysis, but through the warm circuitry of embodied wisdom and emotional intelligence. "Follow your heart." "Trust your gut." These ancient directives sound almost embarrassingly simplistic in our age of decision matrices and expected utility calculations.
Yet for those of us who make a living by operating primarily in our heads, this approach can feel foreign and terrifying. How do you "follow your heart" when anxiety is drowning out its voice? When your gut seems to be sending contradictory signals, each one amplified by the algorithmic echo chambers we inhabit? It's far more comfortable to retreat into the familiar territory of spreadsheets and pro-con lists—those comforting grids of certainty—than to sit with the discomfort of uncertain feelings that refuse to be quantified.
Take the choice of whether to freeze your eggs at 30: The data shows success rates declining each year, while costs and risks can be precisely calculated. But how do you quantify the emotional toll of medicalizing such an intimate decision? The spreadsheet can't tell you how it might affect your dating life, your relationship with your body, or the complex feelings that arise when treating fertility as a technological optimization problem.
Or whether to open-source your company's core technology: The market analysis shows potential network effects from community adoption, and the competitive landscape suggests moving fast is critical. But how do you model the risk of competitors using your technology to outmaneuver you? The spreadsheets can map out developer adoption curves and monetization scenarios, but they can't capture the philosophical tension between your mission to democratize access and your fiduciary duty to shareholders. The data can't tell you if open-sourcing will spark an innovation renaissance or simply accelerate a race to the bottom. How do you weigh the quantifiable metrics against your deeper intuition about technology's role in society—an intuition formed not just by analysis, but by thousands of small moments, conversations, and observations that have shaped your understanding of both human nature and technological evolution?
Recently, while wrestling with a particularly difficult decision in life, I sought advice from my friend S. This multifaceted, very talented man is now building a company, but grew up in the world of theater and learned how to method act. The advice he offered wasn't another framework or mental model, but something far more surprising and simple: to act as if you already have made the decision, as if you’re method acting.
And the best way of successfully acting, he explained, isn't through detached analysis but through deep immersion, giving yourself enough sensory and emotional raw materials to work with until the performance becomes indistinguishable from reality.
Practically speaking, this means immersing oneself completely: Instead of just rationalizing options, fully inhabit them. Want to join Company A? Don't just analyze total comp, benefits, runway, or even product quality. Act as if you've become their employee. Feel what happens when you use the product. Listen to podcasts or interviews featuring the CEO. Internalize their values until they become your own. Talk to your friends and family as if you already work there. Observe what emerges.
This isn't mere roleplay or superficial imitation. Like a method actor accessing emotional memories to fuel authentic performances, you're creating a laboratory of possible selves. Each imagined future becomes as real as the present moment—not in the mind, but in the nervous system, where decisions are truly made. As legendary acting coach Lee Strasberg understood, the challenge is to "respond to stimuli that are imaginary... not only just as it happens in life, but actually more fully and more expressively."
S shared an anecdote illustrating this vividly: when he faced a decision about taking additional capital for his company, preempted by a venture firm, he method-acted the scenario. Almost immediately, subtle yet telling shifts occurred. He started to bloat the product roadmap, planning two features instead of one, and even ordered bottled water rather than tap water at restaurants. "It's trivial—so trivial you'd be surprised," he told me, "but it essentially showed me I wasn't ready for the fundraise just yet."
In this great video essay “Why Timothee Chalamet's Acting Is Different,“ Jesse Grant highlights something remarkable about Chalamet's performance in “Call Me by Your Name.” Unlike many actors who approach scenes with clear objectives—constantly working to advance the narrative or achieve a character goal—Chalamet allows scenes to breathe. His performance isn't about controlling the moment or pursuing a predetermined outcome. Instead, he remains open and responsive, allowing himself to be genuinely affected by what unfolds around him. He inhabits each moment fully, reacting to stimuli in real-time rather than executing a plan, creating performances that feel stunningly authentic precisely because they're not entirely calculated.
In decision-making terms, this means allowing ourselves to remain open and responsive, trusting the process to reveal truths rather than forcing them into predetermined frameworks.
Though not strictly method acting, Wong Kar Wai's masterpiece "In the Mood for Love" offers another striking parallel to this approach. The film took a grueling four years to shoot with no formal script—just a 20-page outline. Wong refilmed countless scenes across various locations in Southeast Asia until they felt emotionally authentic, editing until the very morning of its Cannes premiere.
On set, Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung found themselves adrift—no character backstories, no emotional guideposts. Wong's camera captured their genuine hesitation, their searching glances across cramped hallways and rain-soaked streets.
At first, they grasped for certainty. But as the production wandered through cities and seasons, something shifted. They discovered something beyond technique in the narrow corridors of their fictional lives. A glance held too long. A hand withdrawn too quickly. The barely perceptible catch in the throat.
This wasn't acting as calculation but as lived experience—each took a genuine discovery. When their hands finally brushed on that rain-slicked street, the trembling wasn't performed. Still, it emerged from all they'd felt and suppressed, much like our pivotal decisions require not just analysis, but surrender to the texture of possibility.
The Hyperlegible age—our current moment where everything must be made explicitly knowable, parsable, sortable—has made this kind of immersion both easier and harder in fascinating ways. While we have unprecedented access to explicit, categorical data that our left hemisphere craves—org charts, performance metrics, comp data—the sheer volume can overwhelm our intuitive faculties. Yet paradoxically, this same wealth of information provides richer raw materials for our method acting approach.
Potential hires can now immerse themselves in a company's culture through hundreds of hours of all-hands meetings, developer conferences, product launches, and social media. This isn't just analysis—the gathering of emotional texture, the subtle cues that inform authentic embodiment. Yet there's a critical distinction between consuming corporate content and accessing authentic human experience.
This is precisely why we're seeing founders "going direct" through podcasts, Substacks, and unfiltered social media—they're creating windows into their authentic selves rather than polished corporate personas. You can't truly method-act your way into a decision if you're only working with sanitized LinkedIn posts and corporate Twitter feeds. Nothing genuine will be evoked; nothing meaningful gained.
We've drifted away from direct experience in our hyperlegible, data-saturated world. We live at a remove—our choices filtered through screens, algorithms, and curated feeds that create a comfortable distance from reality. Method acting as decision-making matters precisely because it collapses this distance. It pulls us out of abstraction and back into our bodies, into the messiness and richness of lived experience. Instead of consuming more content about our options, we're learning to inhabit them—to feel our way through possible futures with our whole selves, not just our minds.
The most challenging decisions rarely present themselves as clear winners and losers. They're complex trade-offs between equally valid but incompatible futures. Should you join the stable corporate giant or the risky startup? Move to a new city or deepen roots where you are? Take the investment or bootstrap? These choices aren't just about outcomes—they're about identity. Who will you become in each scenario?
Method acting as decision-making acknowledges this fundamental truth: our choices shape not just our circumstances but our very selves. In choosing between futures, we choose possible versions of who we might become.
This approach doesn't reject analytical frameworks—it transcends them. It integrates the rationality we've cultivated with the embodied wisdom we've inherited. The spreadsheets and pro-con lists become not the decision-makers but simply part of the raw material we work with as we inhabit each possibility.
What emerges is decision-making not as an intellectual exercise but as a transformative practice. We stand always at the intersection of who we are and who we might become. Our significant choices are not decisions about what to do, but about who to be. The method actor knows this—that authenticity cannot be calculated, only embodied. In this way, decision-making becomes not a problem to solve but a performance to inhabit, a rehearsal for the self we are becoming. The answer arrives not when the math checks out, but when the performance feels true.