Death by a thousand opportunities

If you love learning or have a predisposition to starting businesses, it's difficult to set your mind to only ONE thing.

Our world is crazy interesting. The number of ideas knows no bounds.

Each day that passes, the environment changes.
Each day that passes, you change.

And change births even more opportunities.

What should get your attention?

Unlimited optionality means that you could be working on anything. That makes picking just one thing to focus on extremely tough.

Do you suffer from this? Then, you belong to one of the following two groups.

People in the first group can't stay still.
As the saying goes: "You can do anything, but you can't do everything." But, without awareness of it, they try anyway.

They chop chop chop, but they stop before the tree falls.

It's not that they don't believe in the potential anymore. No, it's that they have this deep pull within them. A voice that tells you there might be better opportunities out here, more likely to succeed or fit them.

They are scared to miss out on the next, better idea.

So, they work on an idea for a while, only to stop and leap to the next one.

Then there's the second group—the camp of people paralyzed by the many options. People afflicted by this feel stuck. They won't even start chopping the darn tree because they can't pick which tree to chop in the first place!

Both groups struggle. People experience a constant high level of anxiety about picking and sticking to the right thing to work on.

As edgy as it might sound, the solution is to kill opportunities—okay, not really kill them, but narrow down the options.

I can't tell you the best way to do that. However, I have two suggestions.

The first is to ask a trusted friend to pick for you. Make a case for the different opportunities you'd like to pursue, then ask them to choose. The magic, of course, lies in the work to catch them up. It will force you to consider your options in a nonpassionate way.

The second is to commit publicly. Say what you're going to do, say until when. Share it openly within your community.

These are not silver bullets. After all these years, though I've gotten better, I still struggle with too much optionality. I see new opportunities and ideas everywhere.

I make peace with it by acknowledging it as a superpower.