  In this paper, we discuss a stochastic decision problem of optimally
selecting the order in which to try $n$ opportunities that may yield an
uncertain reward in the future. The motivation came out from pure curiosity,
after an informal conversation about what could be the best way to date
friends. The problem structure turned out to be suitable also for other
situations, such as the problem of optimally selecting the order of submission
of a paper to journals. Despite the seemingly combinatorial nature of the
problem, we show that optimal-tradeoff solutions can be found by simply
ordering a sequence of $n$ real numbers.
