If quality of opportunity follows a power law, you should spend almost all your time searching.
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Umm. Only in fields where execution is like throwing a switch. Like investing.
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Not if you run out of time, money, or motivation looking for it. Search is generally a cost sink, time sink, and motivation killer. There’s also an opportunity cost in terms of learning. Should you get 2x better at your craft working in half as good an opportunity? Often, yes.
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Almost all the blog posts I’ve written were not worth writing by your measure and I should have held out for a better one to strike. Yet blog post impact is indeed power law. My top 3-4 posts out of 500+ account for most of my reputation.
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Very good points!
I also don’t see any reason to accept the initial assertion, that quality of opportunity follows a power law. Why should we think it does? I would think it’s more like a limit, where initial effort (search) pays off a lot but with diminishing returns.


