“Washed Up”

The world is eternally changing, and it’s always a possibility that your best value-add to the world will have a limited shelf life. You may discover that you have some bright, brilliant thing you can do – for a limited time.

Athletes, musicians, actors, celebrities of all stripes, inventors of specific devices, a certain type of entrepreneur: all of these kinds of people might find their candle burning ten times as brightly – and burning out ten times as quickly. A very, very small percentage of these people end up as Mick Jagger or something, with a 50+ year career in their highly specific niche. The remaining majority do not. And then it can go one of two ways.

Some percentage of the people who were really good at their narrow thing realized that the window for it was just as narrow. So while they were rich and famous, they hedged. They started other projects, made other bets. Look at Shaquille O’Neal. A 19-year career playing basketball (and 19 years is a long time to play basketball), but now he’s also a serial entrepreneur with a ton of successful business ventures outside of the ability to dunk a ball. He’ll never step professionally on the court again, but he parlayed that career while it was hot and now he’s set.

Everyone else ends up “washed up.”

The central lesson is this: things being good now doesn’t mean they’ll be good tomorrow, and things being amazing now almost certainly means they won’t be amazing tomorrow. Regression to the mean is a real thing. When you’re on top, it’s easy to trick yourself into thinking it’ll always be like that – but there are far more washed-up players than Shaqs. And it’s not just athletes – for every Mick Jagger or Gary Oldman there are a thousand actors and musicians who were flash-in-the-pan, for every Warren Buffet or Elon Musk there’s an investor or inventor that couldn’t keep the Blackberry or Nokia on top.

When things are good, use those resources to hedge against future storms! When you have a lot of resources, that means you can do a lot of hedging, even without affecting your current lifestyle much. You just have to put aside the ego.