The Zero-Sum Game
Paying the cost to be the boss.
The following is an excerpt from my forthcoming book, Ex Nihilo. If you like this article, subscribe (free) to my Substack to get more excerpts and news about when the full book is released. - Dr.J
Make no mistake, we are all playing a zero-sum game.
Every morning, you wake up with 100 units of output to spend. That is your theoretical maximum output, just 100 units. You don't carry over any remaining unit balance to the next day; instead, you get a fresh 100 every morning. You can spend those units however you like. An average day for you might look like spending 20 units on health and 80 units on career. Do this day in and day out, and you'll have a better job and worse health than someone who spends 80 units on health and 20 units on career.
We don't get to choose our starting state, but we do get to choose our mountain.
There are predispositions outside of our control. Perhaps you were born with a mutation of your ACTN3 gene that gives you the ability to run faster than those without the mutation. Compared to your non-mutant counterpart, your 20-unit spend on running is going to return better results than their equivalent spend. Despite this, if you keep at something, you will improve at it relative to your previous skill level. It only makes sense to index on this as a metric of success since we can't control factors in our life like being born to wealthy parents, or in this-or-that country, or without chronic genetic disease. A whole cottage industry has emerged from addressing these factors. Still, instead of being able to shape the fabric of reality itself, we'll stick to our single controllable, which is the diff between who we are today and who we were yesterday.
It is possible to increase your unit allowance slightly, but you will eventually hit a ceiling. You could improve your cardio or learn to think more efficiently. These are worthy investments with massive returns if made early on. Even with the most disciplined push towards higher capacity, you will eventually hit a point where you are trading units for units. You might be able to shave a few seconds off your mile run time, but at a certain point, that will take so much time that you will have to sacrifice some of your reading time. You can increase your total unit budget past 100, but this scales to a finite point.
Every high performer has a lopsided unit spend.
I once consulted with a staff software engineer who was a genius in pathfinding algorithms. He was unaware of the latest tech trends in his industry to a surprising and sometimes disturbing degree, requiring engineers with decades less experience to explain trivial concepts to him. But if you needed the final word in pathfinding algorithms, nobody could do it like this guy. He could walk into any company working with spatial data, let them know how many bags of money he needed deposited into his bank account every month, tap into some almost supernatural realm of thought, and emerge with the algorithm. He chain-smoked cigarettes, I never knew him to have any social interaction outside of work, and his usage of vulgar language rivaled even my own! Despite all of these factors, he genuinely seemed happy.
Elon Musk and Steve Jobs had estranged children. Lyndon B. Johnson died of a preventable heart attack. Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates couldn't hold their marriages together. Sam Bankman-Fried remains in prison as of the date of writing. You probably know most of these names because, whether you agree with their methods or not, they were among the top .01% of practitioners in their respective pursuits. Every high performer has a lopsided unit spend.
How lopsided? Depends entirely on the mountain. This is one of the factors that makes choosing one a treacherous step. There's some luck involved with reaching the top of any mountain worth summiting, and the prerequisite to getting lucky is to put more points towards the effort than anybody else. You may counter with "work smart, not hard," but guess what, getting smart takes points too. If you want to climb the mountain, you're going to work your ass off. You'll also need to avoid doing too much else while climbing it. Strained if any radio contact with people not on the mountain, austere food, and no showers. It is unpleasant and hostile the higher you go. If it weren't, everybody else would be up there with you!