Opportunity Cost Is Mostly Fiction

On storytelling your way to failure

Doing hard, ambitious things usually requires convincing yourself, and others, that spending a significant chunk of your one precious life writing Google Docs, sitting in long meetings, and responding to emails is somehow really important and cool.

The way most people do this is by selling a vision. A lot of people I work with pitch visions for a living. It’s how they raise money, recruit smart people, and navigate the world. It’s a hard skill to learn, and it usually develops naturally through having to constantly make things sound better than they are.

That works often enough externally to become a habit. And that habit, when turned inward, becomes a trap.

When potential feels like progress

If you’re doing something with real potential, you’re also going to encounter real friction. Day to day, doing anything useful involves mostly friction. Reality turns out to be offensively boring and slow and incremental.

If you’re motivated by your own storytelling, eventually the friction becomes overbearing.

Then a competing idea starts pulling your attention. Something shinier, cleaner, not yet burdened by reality. The new idea feels full of potential. In comparison, the current thing feels more and more expensive. You start spending energy on the vision instead of the execution. It starts as a minor distraction, and soon becomes consuming.

What’s actually happening is subtle: you’re not comparing two real options. You’re comparing one specific, fully-priced, complicated thing against a story that has never had to account for implementation. The story wins every time. Stories don’t have implementation costs.

I call this the zero-cost fallacy.

Why don’t I just start over?

A founder I work with runs a high-ticket recruiting business. The work is emotionally exhausting. Clients in this industry carry enormous expectations, and when things go wrong, they dump the weight on him. After a stretch of setbacks, his instinct was to burn the whole thing down. He could pivot to software, set up new partnerships, and finally execute on bigger opportunities he’d been too busy to pursue. He talked about how freeing it would be to have no team, no payroll, no management. Just explore.

When I started asking concrete questions, the opportunity landscape thinned fast. The partnerships were early-stage. The software had no particular shape.

In reality, he was exhausted and wanted a way out. Fair enough. The recruiting part of the business did kind of suck. But was lucrative enough to have created a profitable business he was now responsible for running while it slowly killed him inside.

We did eventually pivot. But in some sense it was pretty mundane. The pivot was towards something closer to the existing business, stripped of its highest-friction elements which turned out to be only 25% of what he was spending time on anyways.

By getting aggressively specific, we found a workable trade with real and manageable costs. But it was a painful process.

The distance between “burn it all down” and “here’s an actual plan” was exactly the distance between the unpriced alternative and the priced one.

How to Trap Yourself in a Story

Before expanding on how to dodge the trap, it’s worth decomposing what it’s like from inside the experience.

It happens in stages, and it helps to name them, because you can interrupt the process at any point.

First, your situation starts to feel deeply, unbearably wrong. The instinct that something needs to change is often correct. But more importantly, the wrongness feels total. It doesn’t feel specific enough to respond to yet, so it gets projected onto everything.

Soon, the feeling becomes overwhelming, so instead of interrogating it closely, you construct a fictional alternative. You give it just enough shape to feel plausible, but not so much that you have to price it.

This creates fleeting, but palpable relief. If you look too closely at the alternative though, the relief wanes. So you do a looking-away move. Keep the thing vague so you can sustain the feeling of relief.

This spirals. You’re now evaluating your current situation with every real-world complication, every cost, every point of friction fully visible against a dreamy alternative, because you keep looking away before specifics come into focus.

Do this enough times, with just enough success, and it becomes your default move. The moment reality gets too expensive, you generate a cheap alternative.

Whoops, you’ve built a habit of systematically mispricing the world.

Why this is costly in a way that isn’t obvious

For people trying to do things, and founders especially, delusion is often a feature not a bug. The ability to hold a future that doesn’t exist yet and convince other people it’s real is extremely valuable.

Having started many companies myself, and worked with many successful founders, I think it’s fair to say you need some amount of self-delusion to do hard things.

But this is a different kind of delusion. The recursive, emotionally capturing nature of this kind of self-delusion is self-defeating.

Compounding requires continuity. When you blow up something that was starting to work, you lose the accumulated advantage that was quietly building inside it. That loss is hard to see because the advantage was invisible.

The organizational cost is this, multiplied. When a leader’s tolerance for friction runs low, the whole team around them absorbs it. Projects stall without explanation. People start wondering if their current work is about to be invalidated. The leader, lost in the alternative, might read this slowdown as evidence that the current thing isn’t working which confirms the instinct to abandon it. This only tightens the spiral.

Be more specific, then be more specific again

I joke that 90%+ of my advice boils down to “Be more specific”.

So, if you recognize this pattern in yourself, the move is to get uncomfortably specific about your current situation, and the options you think you’re comparing it to.

What exactly feels wrong? What sub-component of that thing feels most wrong? Does the feeling of wrongness happen at specific times? What specifically would have to be different about that specific thing for it to not feel wrong?

What exactly do you mean by alternative A/B/C? How confident are you really in each one? What steps, in great detail, would you have to take for each to really work? How would you know if it was working or not working? Is there a way you could increase your confidence quickly with minimal time or cost?

This all sounds basic, I know. But you might be surprised just how damn rare it is that when someone is making a hugely consequential life or business decision they have actually put significant time and energy into this level of specificity.

That’s because it’s just boringly uncomfortable!

The mundane discomfort of getting specific is the whole point. It’s exactly what the avoidance pattern is designed to avoid. The fantasy doesn’t survive contact with specifics, it was never meant to.

What usually emerges from this process isn’t a clean yes or no. It’s a third option that takes the real signal in the wrongness feeling seriously while grounding the response in actual tradeoffs.

Simple isn’t easy

The founders who navigate this well aren’t the ones who never feel the pull toward the easy exit. What’s different is what they do with the feeling.

Effective leaders learn to sit with the wrongness long enough to ask what it’s actually pointing at, and to answer that question with dazzling specificity before they make any big moves.

I find the instinct that something needs to change is often right. The question is whether the change you’re reaching for is the one the situation actually calls for, or just the one that makes this moment more bearable to be in.