16/ Merely making money is a close-ended problem to be solved, whether your horizon is the next month, the next year or retirement stash
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17/ A baby or baby-equivalent though is an open-ended commitment where it only makes sense if you are willing to plan for success
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18/ It is fine to view paychecks as just a close-ended way to pay bills. It's dumb *not* to wish a book to be open-ended success
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19/ Similarly, close-ended "3x flip in 2 years" startup logic doesn't work for same reason "have baby and kill it at age 3" doesn't work
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20/ So ambition is best understood as your personal process of budgeting for *open-ended* commitments through life, predicated on success
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21/ Fewer people found startups at 40 than 25 (though more who do succeed) same reason fewer people have kids late (bio clock aside)...
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22/ You rationally estimate that your available rest-of-life open-ended best-case attention budget for "one more kid" gets lower with age
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23/ So to summarize: measure your ambitions in baby-equivalent units and take on what you think you can actually raise if successful
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24/ Oh, and one more thing... the way you compute ambition is marginal, same as kids. "Can I afford 1 more kid?" is always the question.
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How many kids/kid equivalents do you think a person can have in a lifetime?
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I think range is huge and a function of how much surplus individuals can produce. Elon Musk has like 4 human kids and 10 baby-equivalents
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Agreed. And not being snarky but I imagine staff comes in, in a big way. You can have four kids and multiple equivalents if you have staff.
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You have to pay for staff though, so that too requires the economic surplus. The direct attention budget is only a subset of whole budget.
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