Recently I've been coming to grips with the fact that my edge might come through discovering information before others. I've sillily compared myself to Magellan, albeit with much more caffeine and much less success.
The thrill of discovery coupled with relentless curiosity, and an uncanny ability to stare at screens for far too long, has led me to a plethora of new things in recent months.
I've chucked time, money, and energy into Ringers, NimBuds, Top Shot, CryptoPunks, EulerBeats, and even this thing....called a Chainface.
It's fun to learn about new things. It's fun to try to be an early adopter.
But spending a lot of time and attention looking for new things and new opportunities presents a potential challenge for someone with only so much capital to go around. Plus, it sometimes can pull my attention away from the news and improvements to already great things I’ve discovered.
So I figure, if I'm trying to be more serious about a pursuit of joblessness, I probably need to start being more serious about opportunity costs — the loss of a potential gain (or loss!) from a different choice.
Here's an incredible recent relevant example from like.....5 hours ago.
I wagered $260 on the University of Pittsburgh's men's basketball team.
Unsurprisingly, I lost $260 betting on the University of Pittsburgh's men's basketball team.
Having made this decision, I lost the potential of gain from utilizing that $260 in a different way.
I could have bought nearly one full share of $FB, 0.14 ETH, .0047 BTC, a nice sword for defending my home, and so on.
Besides the obvious, that is, do not bet on Pitt under any circumstances, there was a legitimate cost at play here. And while I want to still allow myself to be a degenerate sometimes (see also metaverse casino trips), I obviously need to be a bit smarter about the deployment of my capital.
Without suggesting that I get so hyper-efficient that I'm living my life as a mathematical equation1, performing some shoddy cost-benefit analysis and calculating expected value for every move I make, how might you suggest I go about being more cognizant of opportunity costs, particularly as someone who wants to be engaged in so many new things?
Thoughts are welcomed.
A few years ago I started a short lived project called “Living with Logie” - where I crowdsourced surveys on how beneficial particular activities are to the day to day. Using a little bit of optimal portfolio theory and a Taleb’s barbell strategy, I was to create and live by the weighted allocations of the survey results. I didn’t do it. I deleted the project from the face of the internet.