A stitch in time definitely saves nine. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. But that’s easier to say in hindsight – to see what you should have stitched, should have prevented. How do you find those opportunities before you need nine stitches and a pound of cure?

You need pattern recognition. And you need to never, ever worry.

I once saw an insect crawling around in my house – an insect that wasn’t a problem, but if there were a few hundred more, it would be. I took the friend I was hanging out with and went to the store for a few traps and sprays to make a defensive perimeter. I remember my friend asking me: “Why are you so worried about one bug?”

The question struck me as very odd. I wasn’t worried at all. I wasn’t worried because I was doing something about it far ahead of when it would be desperately necessary.

That’s exactly how you avoid being worried, in fact. You worry about things outside of your control. But things that are outside of your control very often grew from things that were under your control (or could have been) earlier in time, and you just didn’t know it, see it, or act on it.

Some people seem to think that “not worrying about something” is equivalent to “don’t take any actions to prevent problems.” Reactive mode only. But to me, that seems like a perfect formula to increasing your worry – by a lot.

So try this. Any time you see something that might cause you to worry and you find yourself saying “Eh, it’s just one bug, don’t worry about it” – listen to the part that says “don’t worry.” But don’t let that tell you to ignore the event. An ounce of worry prevention is worth a pound of worry cure.

You are most vulnerable to your own tribe. Your distant enemies can’t hurt you nearly so much as those you trust and identify with. That fact alone should increase your caution and skepticism considerably.

And it is a fact. Regardless of whether you think your own tribe is “right” or not (and of course you do think that), you’re obviously more vulnerable to them. Outside influence, ideas, and even attacks are met with every defense you have ready. Not only are you already skeptical of information that comes from “them” and expectant of their attacks, you also have the advantage of having the entire rest of your tribe ready to defend you as well.

But when your tribe lies to you, you’ll cut your own arm off before you doubt. When your tribe tries to get you to do things against your own interest but in the interest of the tribal leaders, you’ll do it readily and justify it all day. And if your tribe even tries to harm you, you’ll either take the harm with pride or – if you resist – you’ll claim that it wasn’t your tribe at all, but shadowy agents of some other.

Imagine that there are two people, each trying to convince you of their position. You have zero prior information about either Position 1 or Position 2, and no awareness of the other affiliations of their spokespeople. So for the most part, you’re evaluating the arguments on the merits as you understand them. If Spokesperson 1 says “Position 2 is wrong, and here’s all the evidence to support that argument,” and Spokesperson 2 says “Position 1 is wrong, and you shouldn’t even listen to Spokesperson 1 because they’ll lie to you and tell you that it isn’t, so just stand over here with me because that makes you a good person, unlike Spokesperson 1,” then you should have a really, really strong reason to be extremely wary of #2. Even if you don’t find arguments for Position 1 convincing, at least there are arguments. Spokesperson 2 is obviously a self-interested bully.

Now, that’s how you’ll treat two people/positions that you’re neutral on. But what if that exact same scenario repeats itself, but this time Spokesperson #1 isn’t part of your tribe, and Spokesperson #2 is?

It shouldn’t make a difference. But for most people, it does. Don’t be one of those people. Recognize the patterns of bad faith arguments, and know with certainty that you will always be most vulnerable to them when they come from your own.

Speed is not about time.

It almost never takes “three days” to do something. When you order a custom piece of furniture from someone, and they tell you that it will take four weeks, that doesn’t mean it takes four weeks to make your furniture. It means that there are other things in front, and that your furniture will take X action steps, which will occur over a certain number of weeks. It does not mean that someone will be building your table 24/7 for the next month.

Keep that in mind for yourself. Things happen in action steps, not hours or days. Those action steps can happen on many different cadences. Remember that when you think something is taking too long, or if you feel too pressured, or anything like that. These things are adjustable.

“It’s taking forever to finish this jigsaw puzzle,” someone says, before putting one piece into place and then watching a show for the next hour.

“I don’t want to spend all day on this!” Then don’t – spend 30 minutes a day for two weeks.

Some things are more resilient to moving around their action steps than others, of course. And some things really do take time – it takes nine months to make a baby, pretty much no matter what else you do. But it’s far from universal – most things take exactly as long as you want them to.

Rule #1: Always look cool.

Rule #2: Never get lost.

Rule #3: If you do get lost, look cool.

Meta post today!

I’ve been thinking about other ways to write. (Don’t worry, no plans to discontinue The Opportunity Machine any time soon. Just supplemental things!)

I really like the idea of Substack. I’ve toyed wit the idea of starting a more focused newsletter in the past, but I think something like Substack would probably be better. I actually have several topics that I’d like to go into more deeply but for various reasons this doesn’t feel like the place for them.

The fact is, I really like to write. I like to think, and thinking overcrowds my brain unless I have a way to vent out all the byproducts. I would very much like to continue to develop along that path, and so an experiment with regular writing in another venue as well may be warranted.

As always, open to suggestions. But look out for more!

People, unfortunately, have an extremely strong tendency to do things that look good over things that are valuable towards their ends.

Of course, for many people, the end goal itself is just praise, admiration, respect, etc. Know your Maslow.

But this is why, for example, diamond engagement rings are a thing. It makes way more sense to propose with an equivalent cash value in a long-term investment account as a shared resource for building a life together. But you can’t take Instagram pictures of that.

It’s why a lot of workplaces have people fighting over highly-visible but meaningless assignments, and no one wants to be in charge of the project that takes ten years but just builds essential infrastrucure.

It’s why politics is… well, politics. Watch anything, ever, and this shines clearly.

The point is, be careful. Flashy and valuable actions are often mutually exclusive. Make sure you’re doing enough for yourself and your family that actually matters.

Let’s say you found $1,000 one day. Assume you made all appropriate efforts to find its true owner, but it was in an unmarked bag on a remote beach or something and realistically, it’s just yours. Think about what you would do with it.

The average person would spend that money pretty frivolously, enjoying the brief windfall. They would feel no guilt about blowing the money on whatever, because it was “free” money. So it would make a pleasant but brief impact, and then be done.

Now, imagine one day that you lost $1,000. You had taken out a grand in cash for whatever reason, and somewhere in your travels you lost it. Think about what you would do.

For most people, a great number of negative emotions would happen here. First, panic as you look for the money, and desperation as you search. Some mix of sadness and anger as you realize it’s gone for good. Frustration at your derailed plans. Then on top of that, the plans themselves! Maybe you miss a bill, or fail to make a purchase you’d planned for and around, or have to cancel something else important. Maybe you have to be embarrassed when you tell someone else who was involved. Lots of negatives here.

If you really let yourself imagine and live through those hypotheticals, they don’t really seem balanced, do they? The loss of a grand seems to hit much harder in the negative than the sudden windfall boosts you into the positive.

Consider a change in your strategy as a result of this idea.

Good and bad random events are equally likely. Over the course of your life, you’ll have many of each. But instead of coming out in the wash, 100 random good events and 100 random bad events are likely to have a net negative impact for the average person, because the average person responds to them as I described above. You let good events be flashes in the proverbial pan while bad events have a more lasting and brutal impact.

Instead, don’t let the good events be… well, good. Just incorporate them into your plan. When an unexpected boon graces your life, shelter it. Don’t squander your good fortune, whether it takes the form of money, an unexpected opportunity, etc. A person gets an unexpected paid day off from work because of a computer problem, so they spend it all day watching TV. Then, when they have to work unexpected overtime later in the week to make it up, they end up scrambling to get all of their household chores done. Instead, when the unexpected day off happened, they should have used it to get ahead on the household chores – sort of like “bad luck insurance.”

Most people won’t do this, because they think “I don’t want to ‘waste’ my random windfall!” But that’s because they aren’t clearly envisioning how much worse the opposite event will be. If they did, they’d happily sacrifice the small boon to insure against the larger loss.

If you make a habit of doing this – taking lucky breaks as chances to get ahead of unlucky ones – then over the course of your life, you will be far more insulated against disaster. I knew someone once who received an unexpected inheritance of eighty thousand dollars. Instead of using that windfall to insure against future bad luck, she just chose not to work for two years, frittering it away. Lo and behold, the rest of her life has had plenty (though no more than average life’s worth) of strokes of bad luck where money like that could have staved off a far worse outcome.

You will, at points in your life, be both unlucky and lucky. You can choose to have them mostly cancel out – and that stability will make you luckier still.

You should never try to avoid failure.

You are going to fail! Stuff won’t work out, you’ll make poor choices, or random fate will intervene. There is nothing you can do about this. If you try really, really hard you’ll just waste a lot of effort and the most you’ll accomplish is to redirect the inevitable failures to some other equally-important aspect of your life.

Instead, you want to be failure-resistant. You want the resiliency to withstand failures, endure them, learn from them, and even transform them into new opportunities.

Maybe a handful of times in all of human history was a human life defined by a single day, good or bad. You’re an aggregate. No failure will ever be written in stone across the monument to your life, so just look for the failures you’ll most enjoy or most learn from, and make sure you’re doing so much good and fun stuff in your life that failing at a small percentage of it won’t even bother you.

Failures are stationary. They stay where they happened. If you move forward, you leave them behind.

You should never assume that you’re entitled to anyone’s good opinion.

People so, so often forget about the “Silent Competitor.” The other choices that may arrive if you take too much of someone for granted, even if that option isn’t visible now.

For a good chunk of time, Netflix was the only streaming platform of its type. Some people claimed that it was a monopoly and feared massive price hikes. But the “Silent Competitor” is always lurking. What is it? It can take many forms – other streaming services that can pop up if Netflix gets too complacent (and hey, this is exactly what did happen; now there are seemingly dozens), or even just… not using Netflix. Shocker, but you can survive without it.

When companies hire, I often see them making the mistake of assuming that because they’re the ones hiring, they’re also the ones with all the cards. As if they needed nothing. But if that was the case, why hire at all? This isn’t charity, you need someone to do a job. And you’d clearly rather get someone great at it than someone mediocre, all else considered. Well guess what – the Silent Competitor is there. That person can work somewhere else. Or even not work (for a while, anyway)!

Never take your position for granted. You need to convince everyone, all the time, to engage with you. And if you forget that, they won’t.