If I take one pint of blood out of you every other month, I can take hundreds upon hundreds of pints total in your life. But if I take six pints out of you all at once, that’s all I’m ever going to get.
No matter what you do with your life, you pay for it in blood. I don’t care if you work in a coal mine or if you’re in public relations, if you push yourself hard enough there’s a point where you won’t regenerate what you lose. You’ll pay in blood you don’t have.
You can do that, more or less, exactly once.
The goal in life isn’t to get the highest possible return on a six-pint bucket of blood. The goal is to pay for everything with resources that are regenerating faster than you’re using them. Money, hours, energy, blood, juice – the point is not to get a good ROI on your deficit. It’s to not run a deficit at all.
When someone dies from blood loss, you can’t bring them back to life by putting more blood into their corpse. There are horizons that can only be crossed one way. Remember that what you’re buying isn’t always worth more than what you’re paying. Especially if you’ve paid in blood.
The Opportunity Machine 