Focus on activities for which you have a comparative advantage and outsource whatever else you can. Exploit your edges! Also, spend a significant amount of your time and resources increasing your comparative advantage(s). Become as much of an expert as possible at whatever you are focusing on, though this works better if whatever you are focusing on has increasing returns to expertise. So for instance, getting to the top .1% of programmers is worth a lot compared to even being in the top 1%, but being in the top .1% of elementary school teachers probably not so much.
That shouldn’t discourage you from giving random stuff a try sometimes but I think that should get a limited amount of resources. What I have mostly learned from trying out a lot of different things is that most things are a lot harder than I think they will be. Trying to make money off a website and failing will teach you some things, but probably not the valuable secrets that people who actually make a lot of money off of websites know. In my opinion if you want to maximize your value to the world, or to yourself, you should aim to maximize the number of valuable secrets* you know and can exploit. In my experience you have to really specialize to learn those secrets so that should dominate your productive time.
Another suggestion, somewhat related, is that you should focus on the activities that have the highest expected monetary reward. Prices are a valuable signal that represent the collected wisdom of a lot of reasonably rational actors. They should be an important part of your calculation of how to spend your time. In other words, if someone is willing to hand you a pile of money to do something, that probably means they have thought long and hard about it and consider whatever they want you to do to be very valuable. You should think long and hard about it before you decide that some other activity that no one is willing to pay you anything for is actually more valuable.
*maybe rare knowledge is a better term, since they don’t literally have to be secret, just unknown to most non-experts and difficult to discover.
Hm, I wonder if there is some sort of fundamental trade-off between being a specialist (as you describe here) and being more of a jack-of-all-trades opportunist.
Another suggestion, somewhat related, is that you should focus on the activities that have the highest expected monetary reward. Prices are a valuable signal that represent the collected wisdom of a lot of reasonably rational actors. They should be an important part of your calculation of how to spend your time. In other words, if someone is willing to hand you a pile of money to do something, that probably means they have thought long and hard about it and consider whatever they want you to do to be very valuable. You should think long and hard about it before you decide that some other activity that no one is willing to pay you anything for is actually more valuable.
hmmm—not necessarily. With this heuristic, the common wisdom says it’s much more important that we spend our time working on the docks… or hedge-fund twiddling.. rather than teaching children.
Socially I’d consider the latter far more important, both short and long-term, but more powerful unions have made the former job better-compensated, and the middle-one… well they grabbed that wealth for themselves despite the long-range utility to the rest of the species.
So yes—a heuristic with some benefit, but keep in mind its many failure modes.
I have some other suggestions:
Focus on activities for which you have a comparative advantage and outsource whatever else you can. Exploit your edges! Also, spend a significant amount of your time and resources increasing your comparative advantage(s). Become as much of an expert as possible at whatever you are focusing on, though this works better if whatever you are focusing on has increasing returns to expertise. So for instance, getting to the top .1% of programmers is worth a lot compared to even being in the top 1%, but being in the top .1% of elementary school teachers probably not so much.
That shouldn’t discourage you from giving random stuff a try sometimes but I think that should get a limited amount of resources. What I have mostly learned from trying out a lot of different things is that most things are a lot harder than I think they will be. Trying to make money off a website and failing will teach you some things, but probably not the valuable secrets that people who actually make a lot of money off of websites know. In my opinion if you want to maximize your value to the world, or to yourself, you should aim to maximize the number of valuable secrets* you know and can exploit. In my experience you have to really specialize to learn those secrets so that should dominate your productive time.
Another suggestion, somewhat related, is that you should focus on the activities that have the highest expected monetary reward. Prices are a valuable signal that represent the collected wisdom of a lot of reasonably rational actors. They should be an important part of your calculation of how to spend your time. In other words, if someone is willing to hand you a pile of money to do something, that probably means they have thought long and hard about it and consider whatever they want you to do to be very valuable. You should think long and hard about it before you decide that some other activity that no one is willing to pay you anything for is actually more valuable.
*maybe rare knowledge is a better term, since they don’t literally have to be secret, just unknown to most non-experts and difficult to discover.
Hm, I wonder if there is some sort of fundamental trade-off between being a specialist (as you describe here) and being more of a jack-of-all-trades opportunist.
hmmm—not necessarily. With this heuristic, the common wisdom says it’s much more important that we spend our time working on the docks… or hedge-fund twiddling.. rather than teaching children.
Socially I’d consider the latter far more important, both short and long-term, but more powerful unions have made the former job better-compensated, and the middle-one… well they grabbed that wealth for themselves despite the long-range utility to the rest of the species.
So yes—a heuristic with some benefit, but keep in mind its many failure modes.