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Nothing worth doing presents a price estimate up front. All you can know is whether you can afford the price of irrevocable commitment. After that it’s do X or bust. Changing your mind or quitting beyond the point of true cost legibility is almost as costly as pushing through.
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Many successes we end up living with are the result of thinking at some point: I’ve already paid 99% of a sunk cost and I’d rather have something rather than nothing to show for it by paying the last 1% even if it isn’t truly worth it
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Every significant success is explicitly chosen at the final moment. This last step involves trivial skill and marginal effort. It is merely the decision to actually accept the prize and therefore commit to living with the success. The cost has been incurred but still illegible.
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Chances are you won’t know whether the prize was worth the price until you’ve lived with the success for long enough for both to be integrated into your identity and you become the fully transformed product of both the effort and reward. You are a series of price+prize deltas.
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Big life level-ups: graduations, marriages, parenthood, home ownership, boat ownership all seem to be of this type. You’ll either love or hate the growth delta based on whether prize-price is revealed in retrospect to be negative or positive, once it’s in your bones.
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Really important idea I wish I'd meditated on more in my early years. My only real criteria back then -- "will I win?" Then spent years coming up with wonderfully creative and elaborate rationalizations. I did win a lot. But picked some of the wrong games.
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Having founded 3 startups (and a few side businesses) in the past 10 years, the thing that worries me most is wasting time on losing / mediocre bets.
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I was reading about a former extreme skier I admired whose business is now helping clients manage and channel fear, coming from a thread that pretty much exemplifies #2. While we cannot know in advance the cost of success, we also don't know what else we gain from the risk 1/
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