Elias felt a cold knot in his stomach. He hated Job B. The ping-pong table felt like a gimmick. He had only included it because his friend said it was “the future.” He looked closer at the numbers. He saw that “Growth” had a 41% weight—his own bias, his own secret terror of stagnating, had hijacked the model.
So he went back. He changed the pairwise comparisons. He lowered “Growth” from a 5 to a 2. He raised “Location” to a 7, because his mother had just turned 70. He raised “Meaning” to a 9, because the novel in his drawer deserved a life. analytic hierarchy process excel download free
Every night, he made a list of pros and cons. Every morning, he crumpled it up. The problem was that “proximity to aging parent” and “equity upside” were apples and oranges. Or, as his thesis advisor once quipped, “You’re comparing sonnets to spreadsheets.” Elias felt a cold knot in his stomach