One aspect of serendipity/zemblanity is luck returns on decisions.
There is compounding good/bad-luck returns on good strategic decisions, not just the immediate outcome. So ones made earlier are especially important since more time for luck to compound.
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Assume a luck compounding rate of 8%, that’s 9y doubling for strategic decisions.
So a good decision at age 14 (the age most of us make the first autonomous choices, like how hard to work at school) = 32x luckier life outcome by 68.
Hard drugs at 14, 32x worse, likely dead
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Both 32x luckier/unluckier are relative to mediocre decisions where you make neither brilliant nor disastrous choices.
I think this dynamic is why I’m inclined to be compassionate towards people who seem to have willfully fucked up their lives through their own bad decisions.
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Good parenting I think is primarily about making sure kids don’t make disastrously bad decisions 14-18. Their first and most compounding calls that are hardest to recover from.
Picking a bad major at 19 is a much more recoverable error than aiming/not aiming for college at 14.
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When I moved to the US in 1997 a lot of people told me it was the land of second chances. It’s still true relative to India, where early screw-ups in key decisions are pretty much unrecoverable disasters. India is slightly more forgiving in 2019. But the US has gotten worse.
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