New guy at work just started today and told us he just moved back from living off the grid in Alaska for 3 years after his wife and daughter were murdered. Like dude thats a lot of lore to drop on us at 8am on your first day. Holy shit.
Ideally don't plan your seasons in advance. Just keep enough liquidity to massively reallocate when life presents an asymmetric opportunity.
An great person asks you to start a company, a new technology creates a 2-year window, your closest friends all happen to live in the same city, a once-in-a-decade opportunity to travel with someone, etc.
Maintain enough “life liquidity” (savings, portable skills, low fixed costs, control over your time) so you can massively reallocate when sth unusually attractive appears. Not because optionality itself is the goal, but because it lets you go from 10% to 80% when you finally see something worth doing.
Also why I’m slightly skeptical of overly linear 5 or 10yr life plans. Feels weird to religiously stick to a decision made years ago with a completely different opportunity set just because that was “the plan”. If the opportunity set changes, the allocation probably should too.
When deciding what to chase now, I’d also ask not only “what has the highest return?” but “what has the highest cost of postponing?”
Cause yes, money, skills, reputation and audience can often be accumulated later. But other things are brutally time-sensitive: your kid being 4, your parents still being healthy enough to travel, your whole friend group living 15min away from each other, having no mortgage/kids and being able to disappear abroad for a year, some weird market window that might be gone in 18 months.
tom holland saying “i hope the movie can serve as a beacon of hope to young people that, there’s real bravery in asking for hope. and there’s nothing more important than friends, family, and leaning on the people that you love” about brand new day is so perfect to me