Anything you choose to pursue comes at a cost.
An unbeatable tennis serve requires years of niche practice. Toned abs and marathon lungs only follow a generous amount of sweat and calluses. A multimillion-dollar company demands sacrificing hobbies and relationships.
Costs stand out immediately. But benefits are far less clear. We make nearly all our choices knowing only one side of the equation.
Big or small, decisions come down to obvious costs and unknowable benefits.
It’s true, we often tell ourselves we “know” what it would feel like to leave a toxic job, cut out social media, or meditate more. But rarely do our estimates match reality.
It’s not easy to foot a bill without knowing what it buys, and it doesn’t feel good to push for a vague or ambivalent upside.
The pursuits that offer the best quality-of-life improvements are the ones that:
- Cost the most in time or sacrifice
- Have the least knowable benefits
And usually, the greater you need a certain intervention, the less you understand the benefits — which means even more resistance to the initial cost.
‘I drastically underestimated the benefits’
Brooke LeBlanc, 26, is the founder and CEO of Edge, a platform aimed at helping people give up drinking. She told me in an interview Friday that it’s been more than 1,000 days since her last sip of alcohol.
Before, she drank as much as any other twentysomething living in New York City. A spontaneous 30-day, booze-free stretch, however, ended up transforming her life and becoming her career.
“The cost for me was giving up meeting people as a social drinker, not going out as much with friends,” said Brooke, who writes about sobriety from a cultural lens in her newsletter, Social Experiment. “But I had drastically underestimated the benefits.”
One of those benefits, of course, has been founding a company.
“What wasn’t clear at the start was the new time and energy to invest in my running, spirituality, reading, and I learned just how much better I could take care of myself, and the respect that comes with going sober.”
Our conversation made me think: How many of us operate below our potential because of choices we’re either too blind to see or too stubborn to make?
Here’s how I see it:
- The more we need a change, the less we understand the upside of that change
- The less we understand the upside, the less desirable the change seems
Radical openness
I started writing online five years ago not because I wanted to run a blog, but because I wanted to be a writer. I wasn’t sure how to get there — I had no clue what “there” even looked like — but I decided my best bet was to try as many things as possible.
This rattled my status quo like never before.
I embedded myself in skills and projects I’d never before attempted, and I tested a huge number of ideas in a short time. I learned my strengths and stupidities, and benefited from a youthful willingness to pay any price. My blind spots were revealed, then they got smaller.
Just like Brooke first testing out sobriety in smaller stints, I know now that I was on to something in experimenting with ongoing, small-scale trials.
It seems the antidote to known costs and unknowable benefits starts with radical openness — a willingness to shake things up, invite change, and remind ourselves there are endless ways we can improve our lives.
Radical openness makes costs and benefits moot. It’s about saying “I’ll give it a go,” instead of “What’s in it for me?”
Take cold showers for a week. Read a stack of books about physics. Raise your hand at work for something outside your job description. Give up meat and dairy. Go sober for a month.
Whatever it is, the worst thing that can happen is you learn something — plus you get to see what ideas trigger defense mechanisms, enthusiasm, or curiosity.
I always liked this idea from the psychologist Carl Jung: “That which you need most will be found where you least want to look.”
For our purposes, I think this is a better framing: Living your best life is there for the taking — as long as you’re open to experiment.
Follow Brooke LeBlanc on Twitter, get her newsletter here, and join the waitlist for Edge here.
I write about powerful ideas, recession-proof skills, and building a personal brand in my newsletter every week. Join 1,850 subscribers here.
Be First to Comment