The Opportunity Cost of Everything

Alex: What's up, everyone? Welcome back to another episode of Founder’s Journal. I'm Alex Lieberman, co-founder and executive chairman of Morning Brew. On Founder’s Journal, I act as your startup sherpa, curating the best content for entrepreneurs summarizing it so you don't have to read it yourself, and analyzing it so you have actionable takeaways to apply to your business. Before we hop into it, I have one ask of you. Please share Founder’s Journal on social media. Podcasting is a super competitive game and the only way to grow is through word of mouth and promotion on social. A minute of posting on your end, will make the dozens of hours that myself and the team spend creating the show each week completely worth it. You can either give the show a shout-out or share the single most interesting thing that you learned from today's episode. and make sure to tag me so that I can give you proper props once you post. Now let's talk about today's episode. 

One of my favorite internet writers is this guy named Jack Raines. Jack is a former college athlete and Columbia Business School grad turned writer, who has a knack for breaking down big, weighty topics in a way that packs a punch and feels approachable. I recently reread probably my favorite of his articles, which is titled “The Opportunity Cost of Everything.” Very simply, the article forces you to ask yourself the only question that really matters: If I was nearing the end of my life, would I be satisfied and fulfilled by how I am currently spending my time? It is a question that any human being must ask themselves periodically, but I find that it's especially relevant for the entrepreneur. There are many external forces that can push you down the path of making ego-driven decisions, and I believe this article is a really important counterbalance to ground you. Let's hop into it. 

The Opportunity Cost of Everything. Some thoughts on some things this fine Monday morning by Jack Raines, January 24, 2022. “Every single day, our life is driven by opportunity costs of past, present, and future. While we're not always conscious of it, opportunity costs are at the core of every decision that we make. Decisions themselves are quite literally the inflection point of opportunity where we choose one path over another, the opportunity of a lifetime. Tim Urban has a fantastic blog, Wait, But Why?” 

Which, side note, I absolutely love Wait, But Why? And in some ways, Jack Raines reminds me of like a younger version of Tim, both in the way they break down topics and also the way they like to draw things.

“Every Sunday, Tim sends out one of his most popular old posts. This article from a few weeks ago stood out to me,” and the article that Jack is talking about is called Your Life in Weeks. And the subheader is “All the weeks in a human life shown on one chart.” Your life in weeks. True to its name, this article included a calendar of your life in weeks. I decided to fill mine out through the present date: edgy stuff, a calendar with your expiration date, but that is your life. Maybe your calendar is shorter than this, maybe it's longer, but we all have a calendar, and that shit doesn't renew when it runs out. Pretty sobering, isn't it? Every little thing that we do, every choice we make fits into these 4,680 dots.

And just for context, 4,680 dots is the equivalent of the number of weeks in 90 years of life, and every choice we make comes with its own opportunity cost. Choosing one career is not choosing a dozen others. Choosing one partner is not choosing a million others. Choosing to do something one day is choosing not to do countless other things over time. All of these choices, big and small, determine how we fill in our 4,680 dots, and all of these choices come with opportunity costs, but your greatest opportunity cost isn't any one decision. It's how you fill the entire calendar. Your greatest opportunity cost is your life.

Inequality of time. 4,680 weeks, but not all are created equal. We don't remember the first 250 or so. We don't get the first real taste of freedom until we can drive, after week 832. Don't graduate high school till 950 and 1,150, we're out of college. That is 25% of your life before you're finally quote unquote “free.” Similarly, you aren't free at the tail end of your life either. Declining health, mobility, and cognitive function impair your ability to do what you wish as you get older. In his autobiography, Green Lights, Matthew McConaughey said, “when we truly latch onto the fact that we are going to die at some point in time, we have more presence in this one.”

“I am sitting at week 1,289 right now and I'm well aware of it. That's something I think a lot about, not in a woe is me, I'm going to die type of way. I mean, yeah, you can think that way, but it's still going to happen. That is the price of admission for this weird ride that we're on. I think about it in a, how can I best spend my 4,680 weeks? What should I do more of, less of? What should I attempt? What should I quit? type of way. Those 4,680 weeks are pretty valuable. Once you use them up, they're gone. No refunds, no raises. If you book a hotel and cancel more than two weeks out, you can get a full refund. If you are really good at your job, you will typically be offered a raise. In both of these cases, you either get your money back or you make more money. Time doesn't work like that. We are all given a certain number of days, weeks, months, years. How you spend your time is how you spend your life. No refunds, no raises. You spent a whole day on TikTok and Twitter? Whoops, never getting that one back.” And just as a side note, I think this is why I personally feel so shitty when I spend a lot of time on social, because in one way I feel this pull, this literal addiction to social media that makes it so hard for me to avoid. But on the other hand, after I spent a lot of time on social, I have this feeling like I have wasted time that I will never get back. You turn 30 and would like to have a few more years in your twenties? Sorry, you're out of luck. 

William Penn once said, “time is what we want most, but what we use worst.” I think that is such a good quote. It's this interesting thing that I've actually talked to Jack Raines, the author, about, which is, I think people understand the value of time, and you're gonna read this essay and you're gonna be like, damn, I wish I was more discerning about how I spent my time. But I think it is really hard for people to both have this perspective that time is so valuable, but then actually make changes in their life to spend their time the way they want to do it. And I think one of the reasons is because we are short-term beings. We do things that drive fulfillment, happiness today because we're survivors by training, by evolution, and so we're most focused on what's right in front of us, not what's in front of us 30 years, 40 years, 50 years down the road. And so it's like this weird bug in the human operating system that we know what we should be doing, but we do things that help us for the next week or two weeks, not the next 50 years to 70 years. It's fascinating to me that we try so hard to optimize for every additional dollar, but give no thought to every additional day. It's always, I need a pay raise. It's never, I need a time raise. Mark 836 says, what good is it for someone to gain the whole world yet forfeit their soul? I say, what good is it to amass a fortune yet forfeit your life? How backwards is it that we continually sacrifice our most precious asset, meaning time, for our most plentiful one, meaning money or net worth? Two sides of the same coin. We don't waste time by making the wrong decisions. We waste time by falling victim to routine and not making any decisions. We see this happen in two ways: apathy and hustle. The cost of apathy. Tell me if this sounds familiar.

Wake up at 7:30, roll out of bed, log on your computer at eight, sit around in your sweatpants, make some coffee, work for 30 minutes, then mindlessly scroll through social media. Maybe you eat some leftovers for lunch. Maybe you pick something up. Back to the computer till five, then you hit the gym, come home and shower, watch football, The Bachelor, Game of Thrones, whatever. Then you make dinner and go to sleep because it was a long day. And then you do that over and over and over and over again. That was my life for a year or so. It has been many of your lives too, and it's easy to fall into this trap of passive routine. You're doing your job, after all, you're doing what you are supposed to do, so you continue to coast on autopilot day after day. How many of these dots can you color in with weeks like that? 20, 50, a hundred. There's no telling. That is the danger of an apathetic life. Life will pass you by before you realize it. Imagine getting $10,000 every Sunday, but you can't bring any of the money with you to the next week. Surely you wouldn't waste it, right? You would spend every last cent on whatever you want. Yet we get 10,080 minutes every week. How do you spend those? 

The cost of hustle. You had a 4.0 in college and landed a great job out of school. You got accepted to a top MBA program. Your goal is to follow the American dream resume filler job that pays well in your early twenties, top MBA consulting or investment banking for two years in your mid to late twenties, pivot to private equity around 30. Make as much money as possible. The roadmap to success. The roadmap to success is like a weird game of corporate Candyland. I was on the roadmap to success for a while. The problem was that I never asked myself if I liked playing this game in the first place. I mean, yeah, I would've made a lot of money playing this game. Hell, I probably could have won the game. But was this a game worth winning? Here's how this game would have gone. 

Post-MBA, I would have made a ton of money working 90 hours a week for an investment bank or a consulting firm. It's not like I would have any time to actually spend that money. But if I did the tedious tasks long enough, I would get promoted to a position where I would work slightly less hours doing slightly less tedious stuff and make more money. Sure, I probably still wouldn't enjoy the work, but I never cared about enjoyment, fulfillment, or any other irrelevant metric because those weren't the objectives of the game. Money, power, prestige, those were the objectives. I just wanted to win the game. Opportunity cost be damned. Yeah, I might be miserable, but at least I'd be rich, and people would know it. Hustle and apathy are two sides of the same coin. You are either too disinterested to pursue what you want out of life, or too vain to realize you are pursuing short-lived things.” 

And I just wanna say here, I think so many people suffer from the second, from not even realizing that they are being driven by money, power, and prestige, or even worse, convincing themselves that they are driven by intrinsics, and that acts as a mirage for the true driver of their behavior, which is really ego, extrinsics, and things like money, power, and prestige, and the opportunity cost of both? Your life. The thing about life is that you don't get a do-over. You don't get to go back. You don't get to reach the mountaintop, realize that you can't hold onto those fleeting feelings of success, and try to reset your life, because those dots in your calendar cannot be erased.” 

Before we move on to the next section of this piece, something I just wanna share here is one of the reasons that I share this specific essay is because I think Jack does such a good job of making the fragility of life and the importance of how you spend your time feel so relatable and feel so tangible. And the reason I wanted to find an essay like that is because I think the issue that many of us have is that again, we understand the importance of time. We understand the fact that people say, you know, money doesn't buy you happiness, and rich people die unhappy all the time. And the most common regrets that people have on their deathbed, no matter how much money they have, is how they spent their time or that they didn't spend enough time with loved ones or having experiences that would fill them up. So I think a lot of people understand this intellectually, and I think the hardest part is connecting something from being intellectual to it actually becoming kind of like a driving force of your motivation to spend your time in the way that you intellectually know you want to spend it.

And I think a big issue is oftentimes people will change how they spend their time or change the way that they behave if they experience the lesson firsthand. But the issue with something like life and with the scarcity of time is you don't wanna experience that firsthand, because experiencing it firsthand means that you're coming face-to-face with your mortality in some way that is not pleasant, or worst case scenario, leads to death. Even still, I find that even if you have come close to mortality, people still forget these lessons, right? I just even think about for myself, you know, I should understand the fragility of time and spend your time exactly as you want to, that fills you up. You know, losing my dad junior year of college, seeing someone who is healthy drop dead at 46 years old. It should be so glaringly obvious to me how everything can change in a blink, because I saw everything change in a blink. But what I've realized is the pull of your ego and the pull of extrinsic forces like the world and what the world wants of you is so incredibly strong. And so the more that we can remind ourselves of the importance of spending your time in a way that truly fills you up, in a way that you truly understand the opportunity costs of your time, I think the more we can bring ourselves closer to those lessons by reading about those lessons, the more that it will stay top of mind. So let's hop into the next section. 

“The journey is the destination. Life isn't a Pixar film; it's not a television series. Our life isn't some chain of events and decisions that leads to a climax, a final moment of victory. Life is the chain of events itself. As a college athlete, my goal was to win football games and hopefully win a conference championship or two. But looking back, my favorite memories didn't come from any singular victory or triumph. I missed the million small insignificant things that happened in between wrestling in the locker room after practice, stumbling into 6am workouts with your boys after a late night out, talking shit to each other during practice.

What about the victories and triumphs? Ironically, the feeling of accomplishment always faded quickly after every major victory. Win a game and immediately look to the next, get awarded a full scholarship in front of my entire team and the sense of accomplishment normalizes in a couple of days, gain acceptance to Columbia business school and fall right back into my routine by end of the week. We spend 99% of our lives working towards moments that will encompass a mere 1% of our lives. Then we feel nostalgic about the 99%. 

Work ethic is a good thing. A sense of pride is a good thing. A longing to do great things is a good thing. I have all of those things, and I hope you do too. But those aren't the only thing. If you spend your entire life solely focused on those mountaintops, you'll miss out on the 99% of time in between peaks. And when you do finally summit those peaks, you will immediately set your sights on the next one. You don't have to ignore the journey to enjoy the peak. Look around.” 

I just wanna say here that I can't agree with this more. The thing that comes to mind as Jack talks about his accomplishments, whether it was with Columbia Business School or winning a football game or you know, having an essay like this blow up on the internet, is that the feeling of excitement you get when the world rewards you externally for these wins, not only is it quickly disappearing, but also every additional win you have after that first win decreases in how much happiness it brings you, because you become desensitized to the feeling of the win. And when I think about us selling Morning Brew, everyone thinks that when you sell your company, you feel like you're on top of the world. When you get money wired into your bank account after a sale, you must feel this ecstasy. And I felt none of those things. And when I think about the times that I felt most joyous around Morning Brew, to be honest with you, it was like the entire first four years of the business. Like I remember just saying every week, I can't believe I get to do this for a living. I can't believe I'm paid to do what I do right now because I'm so passionate about the work I'm doing and the people I'm doing it with. Of course, there are times where it is frustrating and it is stressful, but overall like these small moments, whether it's, you know, figuring out what Morning Brew’s referral program was or whether it was packing envelopes to send to our best readers with the whole team, or whether it was thinking about the design of our new office with the small team that felt like a family, or whether it was planning out our first new product that came out after our first newsletter. Those moments that the actual journey that led to this big outcome, those are the things I will always remember. And I'll remember those moments with way more clarity than the moment of us selling the company.

And then the last section of the essay is titled, Someday Isn't a Day. “Taking risks is hard, and having difficult conversations is hard, and doing spontaneous things is hard. Pulling the trigger on any crucial task is hard. And we make it harder by convincing ourselves that the timing isn't right. Oh, after blank I will blank. I can fill those blanks in with a million different situations from my own life. Oh, after I make some more money, I will take that trip I want to go on. Oh, after I work for a few more years, I'll be stable enough to try that business idea. Oh, after I have more experiences, I will finally go after that opportunity. 

No, you won't. At least not while you're waiting on the timing to be right; there will literally never be a convenient time to take a risk or shake up your life. You can either seize the moment or let it slip by. We rationalize with ourselves that the only reason that we didn't do X is because the timing isn't right, but the timing is never right. I was a huge, oh, after blank, I will blank for a while, but there's something funny about knowing that you have an expiration date. It puts a little fire in your step. Like McConaughey said, when we truly latch onto the fact that we are going to die at some point in time, we have more presence in this one. Once you realize how short your time is, you stop waiting for the timing to be right.”

And I'll just add here that probably the single biggest decision in my life, other than marrying my wife, is the decision to go all in on Morning Brew, to quit my job on the path in finance trading at Morgan Stanley. And the funny thing about it is not only was it not an easy decision, it was a decision that took me a year to actually make. I spent a year thinking about it. There were many times where I was about to make it and then I called an audible and didn't quit. Funnily enough, my friends, there were a few times where I told them I was gonna quit the coming week. They threw a going away party for me because they were planning that I was gonna quit. I didn't quit, and I became like the boy who cried wolf about quitting my job.

I finally quit my job to go all in on Morning Brew, and it absolutely did not feel a hundred percent right. At the time, I did not know it was definitively the right decision. It felt messy. I knew there was a very significant chance that it was the wrong decision. I knew that there was a chance that the business would fail. That said, also, even though the timing will never feel right, it doesn't mean that you're not calculating the risk and being thoughtful about the decision. I was extremely thoughtful about the decision, but also with really hard decisions, you can both be extremely thoughtful and not know if you're making the right decision, and that is actually the complete normal way that things go down when you're making hard choices. Okay, let's finish this thing up.

“Perspective. In a commencement speech at Stanford University, Steve Jobs said it best. “Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything, all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure, these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.” 

This is kind of what I was saying before about the closer and closer you are to feeling your mortality. Unfortunately, in the context of Steve Jobs, he was quite literally facing his mortality within weeks of truly experiencing it. That is when you truly let all of the ego and external driven things melt away. And the big question I always think about is, how can you feel what Steve felt without being in the position that Steve was in in a newsletter that you're reading right now? Jack Raines is going to say it second best. 

“There's too much cool shit to do in our short time here to waste your days on stuff that you really don't care all that much about. Profound, no? I've come to two seemingly contradictory conclusions over the last couple of months. One, nothing matters. Two, everything matters. When you realize that nothing matters, you are free to drop the inhibitions that prevent you from pursuing what you want. The timing isn't right. What will everyone else think? Who cares? The timing is right if you make it right, and who cares what everyone else thinks? When you realize that everything matters, it spurs you to pursue what you want with reckless abandon because if you want something, you have to make it happen. I've made some interesting choices since coming to these two conclusions. I quit a steady job, lived out of a backpack in 19 countries for four months, started working for an anonymous meme page, which makes “what do you do for a living?” a really fun question to answer. I used to be terrified of sharing my thoughts online and now I've published a hundred plus articles in six months. I was always intimidated by double black diamonds at ski resorts. Last weekend in Breckenridge, I summoned the tallest peak possible and crushed it just to say I did. And next week, I'm flying one way to Buenos Aires, Argentina, because my Spanish sucks and I want to go practice. When you realize that nothing matters and everything matters, you lose those inhibitions that beg you to wait till the timing is better. You ignore that voice in your head that tells you those risks are too great. What risk is too great? You're already dead. There's only one risk: not seizing every opportunity that you can in this life because you won't get those chances again. You think the risk is growing up. The real risk is never trying. What are you going to do about it? Every seven days, you fill in another dot on your calendar. We don't get to make the rules, but we do have to play the game. What are you going to do about it? Are you going to let life pass you by while you're sucked into your routine? Are you going to spend your best years chasing some vain accolades that no one else will care about anyway? Are you going to be so intimidated by the prospect of trying to figure out what you want to do that you never even try? I hope not. 

Here are some thoughts that I have about this game. Spending all of your time doing stuff that you don't like because you think more money or more prestige down the road will be worth it only guarantees that you spend all of your time doing things that you don't like. Two, being good at what you are supposed to do is overrated. Three, there is a one for one correlation between things that intimidate you and things that you should pursue. Four, there's never a convenient time to take a risk or do anything worthwhile. You can either do it or always wish you had. And my personal favorite, whoever has the most fun wins, and the guy who dies with the highest net worth, he should have found cooler stuff to spend money on. You are your own biggest opportunity cost. Do something about it. Happy Monday. Jack.” 

So that is Jack Raines's essay titled, “The Opportunity Cost of Everything.” If you enjoyed this piece, I highly recommend you read his other work, which you can find at youngmoney.co. Jack is also a great social media follow and he's an A+ troll on Linkedin, so I'll drop his social handles in the show notes. Before we go, just a quick reminder to give Founder’s Journal a shout out on social and tag me so I can thank you personally. As always, thank you so much for listening and I'll catch you next episode.