Hopelessness is the key to opportunity selection.
“Don’t give up hope!” – Random bad guru.
A lot of people hope for better opportunities – ones that have faster results, are easier, are safer, are more fun. A lot of good opportunities take time to get through – whether it be schooling of some sort, working as an apprentice for peanuts, and so on.
People feel better doing nothing and hoping for a better tomorrow for 2 years with no clear outcome, than to do something that they know will be grueling for 2 years but has a clear positive outcome.
If they simply gave up hope that there’d be something better, they’d focus on one thing and start moving forward. – Truth cake.
If you can see that there’s a solid chance that doing something unpleasant for a period of time will result in something positive, it’s probably better to go for that than to keep hoping that another better opportunity will show up. If you know that it takes a year of working as a Realtor will not make much money but after that it has a high likelihood of paying off, it will likely be better to simply do that than to search for another year to find something that only takes 3 months of grueling work for it to pay off.
Time is your enemy when it comes to decisions, time is your friend when it comes to the grind. – Truth Cake.
So, consider 2 options:
- Start something now that takes 12 months before there’s a pay off.
- Search for an opportunity that takes only 3 months to pay off, but it takes 12 months to find that opportunity.
In this scenario, even if you do find something better in a year that takes 75% less time for a pay off, you’re still WORSE off because it took so long to find it. It’s usually far better to just start than to find better opportunity.
Deciding is often slower than the initial pain point of most opportunities. – Truth Cake
How many times would you have been better off to just start executing an opportunity with a slow ROI than spending the time trying to find a better opportunity with a faster ROI?
