Which errors to focus on?
So many missed opportunities. Decisions not made, errors in judgment, opportunities lost.
Perhaps you didn’t buy Google stock at $80, didn’t buy ETH at $5, didn’t buy that winning lottery ticket… You also didn’t take that course in college, or go out of your way to meet that person on campus or learn Spanish when you had the chance.
But most of the time, those aren’t the things we’re obsessed about. Instead of these huge opportunities not seen, we think about the near misses, the ones we had some sort of proximity to. As if the emotional proximity to a choice is the thing to feel badly about. So, instead of thinking of the $10,000 we didn’t make by buying a certain equity, we think about the $10 we affirmatively lost by leaving it on a counter. Instead of thinking about a breakthrough paper we didn’t write, we worry about a typo we made in a brief years ago.
One is thousands of times more expensive than the other, and the amount of effort in each is the same, but our minds focus on the one where we feel like we had more responsibility. Which causes us to focus even more on the wrong sort of decision in the future.
The roads not seen almost always matter more than the potholes we hit along the way.