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Optionality is for Innumerate Cowards
Paradoxically, preserving optionality can mean saying no to a lot of opportunities and avoiding anything that will prove to be restrictive. We need to look at choices through the lens of the optionality they will give us in the future and only say yes to those that create more options.
Farnam Street • Preserving Optionality: Preparing for the Unknown - Farnam Street
My own theory is that, in the real world, people do not want the mathematically optimal strategy. They want the strategy that maximizes for how well they sleep at night.
Morgan Housel • The Psychology of Money: Timeless lessons on wealth, greed, and happiness
Picking a path reduces optionality, so people stay in limbo and don’t make commitments. This language doesn’t only apply to career planning. Some students talk about marriage as the death of optionality. But life is not like options trading.
David Perell • Peter Thiel’s Religion
The secret is that taking risks provides optionality as well, via learning and differentiation. If you go to an ivy league school or elite consulting firm, however, you're merely one of many. Even something as prestigious as a Harvard degree makes you only one of 315,000. If you start a company, you can truly become one of a kind—you'll be one of a... See more
Erik Torenberg • Reconsidering Career Optionality
But for most of us, if we’re being honest with ourselves, the temptation is often to exaggerate potential consequences, so as to spare ourselves the burden of making a bold choice. (It’s a particular peril among the progressive-minded, I’ve noticed, to take the fact that a given choice might be unfeasible for the underprivileged as a reason not to
... See moreOliver Burkeman • Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts
