Most People Have Never Actually Listed What They're Selecting For. Ori's First Exercise Often Starts There.
Every choice — who to date, what job to take, how to spend a free evening — is an act of selecting for something, whether or not the selection criteria were ever consciously set. Asked directly what they're actually optimizing for across their own repeated choices, most people can offer a stated version, but the stated version and the version actually operating are frequently different.
The stated criteria tend to be the ones that sound reasonable when said out loud — the values a person would defend in conversation. The operating criteria are visible only in the pattern of what actually gets chosen, repeatedly, across many decisions that don't individually feel connected but collectively reveal a consistent selection rule running underneath.
This gap is rarely dishonesty. It's simply that the stated criteria were arrived at through reflection, while the operating criteria were arrived at through repetition — and repetition, not reflection, is what's actually steering most choices in the moment they're made.
Naming what's actually being selected for — not the version that sounds good, but the version the choices themselves keep proving — is often the first useful move in understanding a pattern, because it replaces a vague sense that "something is off" with a specific, checkable claim about what's actually driving the decisions.
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Momar Lissa Ndiaye ("MLN") is the Founder & CEO of weyoga Inc., a Delaware company. — weyoga.ai · mln@weyoga.ai