Seeing Slopes
When we make decisions, we often fixate on where things stand right now. We look at the numbers, the situation, the snapshot, and think, "This is what I have to work with." It’s natural. It feels concrete. If you’re choosing a house, you might obsess over the square footage or the price today. If you’re picking a job, you might weigh the salary or the title on the table. The absolute value, the "what is", seems like the bedrock of reason. But I’ve come to think that’s a mistake. The real trick to deciding well isn’t about where things are. It’s about where they’re going. It’s about the slope, the trend, the gradient of change.
Think about how we judge people. You meet someone, and they’re kind of a mess, late to everything, awkward in conversation. The absolute state of them isn’t great. But then you notice something: they’re getting better. They’re showing up a little earlier each time, their sentences are starting to cohere. Compare that to someone polished, punctual, smooth-talking, but you sense they’ve peaked. They’re coasting, maybe even sliding backward if you squint. Who would you bet on? Most of us, if we’re honest, would pick the one climbing over the one perched at a high but static point. That’s gradient thinking. It’s not about the altitude; it’s about the angle of ascent.
This isn’t just intuition, it’s how the world works. Nothing stays still. A house isn’t just its current price; it’s the neighborhood’s trajectory, the way the market’s tilting. A job isn’t just the paycheck; it’s the skills you’ll pick up, the momentum of the field. Absolute values are a photograph, but life is a movie. And in a movie, you don’t judge the story by a single frame. You watch the arc.
Why do we miss this so often? Part of it is laziness. Snapshots are easier to grasp than slopes. A number is a fact; a trend is a guess. To see a gradient, you have to look twice, once at where things are, once at where they were or might be. That takes effort. It’s also scary. Absolute values feel certain, even if they’re misleading. Trends force you to admit uncertainty, to lean on judgment instead of data you can point to. But the bigger reason, I suspect, is that we’re trained out of it. School teaches us to solve for x, not dx/dt. We’re rewarded for nailing the "right" answer, not for spotting the direction things are drifting.
Take money as an example, not because it’s everything, but because it’s simple to measure. Say you’ve got two options: a pile of cash now, or a smaller pile that’s growing fast. The absolute thinker takes the big pile and calls it a win. The gradient thinker asks: how fast is the small pile growing? If it doubles every year, while the big pile sits there, the choice flips fast. This is how compound interest sneaks up on you. It’s not the amount in your account today that matters; it’s the rate it’s compounding. People miss that because they stare at the balance, not the exponent.
Or think about health. Your weight today, your blood pressure, your mile time, these are just dots on a graph. If you’re 20 pounds overweight but dropping a pound a month, that’s a different story from being 20 pounds overweight and gaining. The absolute number might scare you, but the trend tells you whether to panic or cheer. Doctors know this instinctively; they don’t just read your chart, they track your progress. Yet most of us, outside the clinic, fixate on the latest reading and forget the line it’s part of.
Seeing slopes isn’t magic, it’s a habit. You start by asking: what’s changing? Not just "what’s this worth now," but "how’s it shifting?" You look for evidence over time, not just at a moment. It’s like sailing: you don’t steer by where the shore is, but by how the wind and current are pushing you. And you get comfortable with rough guesses. Trends aren’t precise like a balance sheet; they’re fuzzy, probabilistic. That’s okay. A blurry map of where things are headed beats a sharp picture of where they’ve stopped.
There’s a catch, though. Gradients can trick you if you overthink them. A steep climb might reverse tomorrow; a plateau might be the calm before a leap. Context matters. You have to pair trend-spotting with a sense of why things are moving, otherwise, you’re just extrapolating blindly. And sometimes the absolute value does matter. If you’re starving, a loaf of bread now beats a bakery opening next year. But even then, the gradient whispers: what’s your next meal look like? Survival’s a snapshot; thriving’s a slope.
The best decisions I’ve made came from trusting this. Not the ones where I grabbed the shiniest thing in front of me, but the ones where I bet on something small, unglamorous, moving upward. The worst came when I clung to a high point that was quietly eroding. It’s a shift in how you see: less like reading a sign, more like feeling a breeze.
Absolute values shout. Trends murmur. Listen to the murmur.