Optionality: How to Survive and Thrive in a Volatile World

By restricting your choices along one dimension, you can create more freedom along a dimension that’s more important to you. Almost every life philosophy—minimalism, Christianity, the Paleo diet, whatever—boils down to this kind of trade-off.

Money is just one of many precious Currencies of Life: time, health, mental bandwidth, energy, social status, hedonic pleasure, meaning.

Consumer capitalism is designed to give us the illusion of great choice, even while it traps us within one narrow sector of possibility-space. Its branching confusopolies ensnare our monkey minds, and steal our most precious resources: money, time, and attention. The end result is that we spend almost all of our efforts deliberating over a predeter

So that's my promise to you. On the defensive side, this book will get you into the position of 'not losing'. On the aggressive side, it will maximise your chances of hitting the big one. You can never be sure if the universe will come to the party, but optionality is the best system for making your own luck.

EUDAIMONIA. (noun) from the ancient Greek εὐδαιμονία: The ideal state of human flourishing. To go beyond happiness, health, and prosperity, to living a meaningful and virtuous life.

So: what we're looking for is trades that offer large, unlimited upside with small, fixed costs.

most of our time and attention is consumed by endless variations of low-quality options. Consumer capitalism presents us with doors and passages which only lead us deeper into the labyrinth, distracting us from making the decisions that really matter. These low-quality options are Dead Ends. They sometimes lead to modest rewards, but it’s a lot of

the second timing factor: volatility. In domains where nothing ever changes, there's no point in constantly opening new options, and you can shift most of your efforts to exploitation fairly early on. But high-volatility domains reward us for constant exploration, and punish those who switch to pure exploitation too early in the piece.

When you’re exploring unknown territory or attempting difficult things, the feedback loop between effort and reward is laggy and unpredictable. It’s doubly hard when you’re simultaneously trying to wean yourself off a reliable source of pleasure, and overcome the constant temptation to return to its mediocre but familiar embrace.

This gives us the first factor for the optimal timing of opening options: the window of opportunity available to us. The longer the timeframe, the more resources we should devote to upfront exploration, and vice versa.