Imagine you are in a carriage, but there are no horses attached. You’re in complete control, but you’re not going anywhere anytime soon. So you get yourself a horse, and you hitch the carriage to it. Now you’re moving, but you also have to contend with the will of the horse. Add a few more horses and you have much more power, but now you must contend with multiple wills that not only don’t match your own, but also might not match each other’s. That forward momentum will collapse quickly if some of those horses want to go left, some want to run faster, and some want to pull off to the right and stop.
In this analogy, “horses” are the resource inputs in your life. You need them to move forward, but each one is also trying to do its own thing.
There’s no such thing as a free lunch – or a horse without a mind of its own. So while we often think that more resources are what we need in life, we also have to contend that resources are not mindless. You will never just have a big pile of money dropped in your lap without an agenda attached to it.
A big part of this game is finding horses that are either easier to tame (even if they’re less powerful) or that already tend to do what you want a horse to do. That’s definitely more beneficial to you than just finding the most powerful horse (or horses!) that you can, attaching them to your carriage, and hoping for the best.
Going in the wrong direction is bad, even if you go there quickly. And fighting with your own horses never made anyone happy.
The Opportunity Machine 