The Goldilocks and Three Bears

Goldilocks basincally a children story. Goldilocks, a girl, wander in a forest. Later, she found a house and enter house. Upon entering the house, Goldilocks found a three bowl of porridge. She taste the first bowl and thinks it is too hot for her. As for the second bowl, she thinks it is too cold. She taste the last bowl and thinks this is the most suited one for her so she ate it all up.

After feeling full, Goldilocks decide to rest in a chair. There are three chair in the rooom. The first one felt too big. The second one is also too big. Alas for the last chair, it is perfectly fit for her. When she still resting in the third chair, the chair is broken.

Goldilocks feel sleepy, so she decide to find bedroom. She found three bed in the room. First is to hard for her to lay on. Second one is too soft for her. Again the third one is the one suited for her. While she falls asleep, bear family, consisted of father, mother, and child, come home.

Bear family found that someone eat the porridge but only one bowl is emptied out. Bear family also notice that someone sit in their chair and child bear chair is broken. Family bear come to shock as they saw a girl sleeping. Goldilocks, awaken because the presence of the bears, gasped and run away and never return tp the bear house. — The most obvious moral code you can get from the story is don’t tamper with someone else property. Also don’t trespass some random house. The more subtle code you can get from the story is something good usually falls in a certain margin between two extremes. This principle is what we want to discuss with this article.

Sweetest Balance

Common case in our life, we faced two ends of a value. At each end, we found different consequences. We felt both consequences are too extreme so we try to adjust the value so we can bear the consequences. We can think it is as choosing shower temperature. If it is too hot, you could get blistered. If it is too cold, you could get cold. There are middle value which is still comfortable not hurt your self. While life choices is not as physically present such as water valve, we can take an abstraction from it and apply it to our daily life.

In our life, we rarely encounter extreme value are the right one to choose. The sun undoubtly touches every aspect in our life, but closer to the sun leads to a better life? Inexistance life in planet Mercury tells no. Stray further from the sun will also cause life cease to exist. So the earth and it varying distance from the sun is the sweetest balance that could floursh a life. Position of earth called the goldilocks zone; one of the measurement of the probability of extraterestial life.

Let’s move on to more mundane stuff that we encounter every day. Does supervision enhance productivity? Strict supervision will cause unrest because it limits creativity and we does not like constantly being watched. Does unsupervised boost productivity? Also no, because we tend to procastinate. Business cannot thrive in such atmosphere. So what path should we take? same thing as the shower, we need to search the sweetest balance.

How do find it?

So the question continue, what should we do if we want to find the sweetest balance? We need to try out one by one, especially when we still green about it. Back to the shower example, we need to adjust the valve. One time we felt too hot so we move the valve to the colder position. If we overshoot the valve and felt the water is too cold, move it to opposite direction. This adjusment is called iteration and have many application both in science and daily life.

Unfortunately, iteration is a form of priveledge. Not everyone have a chance to iterate in every two extreme value in their life. For example, wealthy persons find that failure is acceptable because they have a lot of resource to spent when they want to build a new one with knowledge of why it is a failure before. On the other hand, not-so-wealthy persons find failure is not acceptable because they allocate all resources they have to a single effort and doesn’t have any more resource to make up their failure.

One of the way to cope with this is search for the advice from experienced guy-a mentor you could say- and learns from the mistakes. It is not as good as experiencing the failure by ourselves but it is better than going to a battlefield without any information.

This is also the reason why company values experience because all those year - ideally - represent the iteration they’ve done.

Final Thoughts

While the shower example is convinient example, many problems are not solved by turning one valve. Problems come with many valves of two extremes and we need to find the best adjustment of these many valves. In mathematics, we could say the problems is $n$-Dimensional. As things got more complex - such as running a multinational company - the $n$ is also get bigger. For these problems your friend is still iteration.

There are many things you could found by recognising that there is a middle value in a two extremes. Recognising these values exist and objectively recognise the cons and pros could lead to quicker way to find the sweetest balance. Objectively recognosing problem only can be achieved when you don’t associate yourself these two values. The more you associate yourself with this value, the more you biased towards it.

We give you many example of Goldilocks principle and hope you could find and recognise the sweetest balance in your own daily life, career, or even your dreams. We also want to note, that everything changes, so maybe you want to keep finding the sweetest balance in your present condition. Last but not least, helps other people finding sweetest balance is a good things to do.