What's your Ulysses Contract

Ulysses, the legendary Greek warrior, was on his way back after winning the Trojan war. During his sea sojourn back home, he realized that his ship will be passing the island where the beautiful Sirens lived. Sirens were famous for singing such melodious songs that the sailors would get enchanted. The Sirens would leave the sailors spellbound, who in a bid to reach them would often crash their ships on to the rocks.

 Ulysses was very keen to experience their songs, yet didn’t want to let his people down by wrecking his ship. He came up with a fascinating solution.

 He asked his men to tie him to the mast of the ship, and ensured each of them had their ears filled with beeswax. This meant that he could hear the Sirens, but his men could not. He also gave strict instructions to all his men not to pay any attention to his orders and cries of diverting the ship, and keep rowing as planned earlier.

 He knew that his future self may not be able to showcase the requite self-control and make a sound decision. To counter for this, he took the decision when he had more control and sanity, and ensured his future self wasn’t tasked with decision making. This deal between your present self and future self has since been known as the Ulysses contract.

 Some daily life examples of Ulysses contract include doing systematic investment plans (SIPs) as we feel that if left to us we may end up spending our income on discretionary consumption expenditure. Another example could is having a buddy who you promise to see in the gym at 6 AM in the morning. The social pressure of having to meet someone may push your future self to honor the commitment vs. missing the gym if there was no much pressure.

 Ulysses contract can be a great tool to keep moving forward. It is at the heart of analytics & data driven decision making models. If we look at what banks do today for parsing through a credit card or loan applications, they essentially look at data science models that have predefined variable (such as age, income, credit score, etc.) based on which the decision to give loan or not is taken. Unlike in the past, it is not based on qualitative factors that the credit officer may twist to increase his volumes. This is also followed in most IT/ ITES companies where the base selling price is fixed, with escalations required right at the top in case of exceptions. 

 For our individual careers as well we can benefit from this concept. Take for instance deciding on a job opportunity. Now, when we are sitting on an offer or two, we are likely to get tempted either by the money or the designation or proximity of the office to where we live, etc. A more sane approach will be to write down what are the top decision criteria we want to use when faced with an opportunity and share it with someone we trust – could be with the spouse or peer. Then when faced with an opportunity, we have that trusted person keep us honest on our decision making criteria and not get tempted by distractions.

 Take another instance of planning your career. Often, I have found that when we are working in a role/ company, we can get biased in evaluating our successes and failures, and therefore the decision to continue or not to is taken based on how recent chain of events (rather than being objective) have unfolded. Using the Ulysses contract here we should at the beginning of the year define a 1 year or 2 year view on what if we achieve (or not) would mean we want to continue with the firm (or not). A preset success/ failure criteria, can ensure the recency factor is taken out of decision making, and prevents us from either overvaluing or undervaluing our current opportunities.