Life's Opportunity Cost

“In life, we must choose our regrets. Opportunity cost is built into life.”

I’ll be the first to admit that I am horrible at remembering quotes and their origin. 

While the essence of certain quotes has stuck with me - the quote itself is usually lost to me. 

This is true of the above quote but each time I have heard it or read it, it resonates with me. 

This may have been Chris Williamson quoting a conversation with Christopher Hitchens - not to be confused with Alex Hitchens (if you know, you know).

Regardless of who said it, this is such a unique framing of life and one that actually led me down the path that I am on. 

I studied Japanese for over 2 years. I failed the JLPT N4, a test that is meant to show your proficiency in the language (this is the second lowest level). I had slotted myself for an exam that I knew would be a reach and didn’t do… Horribly? I did bad but didn’t get the lowest scores in any section so I’ll take my wins. 

A year after, I was scheduled to take the N3 - which would indicate that I was an intermediate. As I began competing against people on Lingq to get massive amounts of exposure to the language, I had a thought. 

How does learning Japanese contribute to my broader goals? 

I went to Japan for my 21st birthday and fell in love with the culture. I went in with zero expectations and found myself loving the respectful nature of the Japanese lifestyle. 

While I was there, I went to an Izakaya, which is Japan’s equivalent of going to a pub in England or Ireland, and in walked a tall white guy speaking fluent Japanese to the chef. 

The place lit up with his presence. The chef and surrounding people had smiles so big that I was shocked their cheeks didn’t cramp up. 

In that moment, I knew that I wanted to be that white guy. The man that goes to other countries and shows his appreciation and respect towards the place that he is visiting and learns some of the native language as a sign that he cares. 

I will achieve this goal but at this stage, I’m not sure when I will make it back to Japan. It could be a couple years, it could be a decade. 

The more I reflected on the question of how does learning Japanese contribute to my larger goals, the more I realized that it would fulfill me in one small component of my life but it wouldn’t get me to where I ultimately want to be.

With life, time is our most scarce resource and I was dedicating hours each evening learning a challenging language that would bring me some fulfillment with watching anime and a lot of fulfillment when I would travel to the country - hopefully once or twice before I die but that is an insignificant portion of my life. 

What goals could I pursue that would give me an opportunity to actualize this goal in months instead of years?

I have to find a way to buy my time back.

I’ve always had aspirations of starting a company and getting to a point where I regain control over my life. 

I am not yet ready to make that jump but I am working to build my personal brand by helping others to set myself up to make that leap. 

To some this way may feel backwards but it logically makes sense for me. 

I am no-longer in a position where I have nothing to lose and it would not be fair of me to ask my wife to sacrifice the lifestyle that we have for me to throw all of our money into something that might not work right away. 

I am committed to the long term success of a business but am risk averse so I am trying to find a way to offset future risk by building more security now.

Once I am able to do this, I become my own master of time and master of self and can focus on the less impactful goals that are lower impact to others but still are fulfilling to me. 

I started by trading my time to learn Japanese. Hours and hours of every night. I recognized that I was making the trade off of sacrificing my larger goals to pursue this. A larger goal that I could pursue instead is building a business. But the trade off of jumping into that is sacrificing the current financial security my wife and I have for the next five or more years - I am unwilling to make that sacrifice at the moment. 

So I moved to my conclusion. I will sacrifice my goal of Japanese fluency to focus on the goal of serving others through content creation. My hope is that by sharing my experiences and my learnings, I can help thousands of people achieve their goals. 

I have chosen the regret of focusing on building a personal brand and pursuing a business dream in the future instead of learning Japanese. 

This directly feeds into the business that I want to create and would give me an audience to market to that trusts me. 

It’s a trade off that ultimately sets me up for the highest likelihood of success with the lowest downside. I get to help people that will hopefully want to return the favor in the future. 

My perspective is that if I do a great job helping them, helping you, you will want to return the favor. 

All I have are my theories and evidence from other people but I am living my learnings and sharing them, hoping that it will help you find your way too. 

It’s a damn shame that we will invariably die with goals left on the table due to the opportunity costs of what we had to pursue. 

My question to you is - is what you are currently leaving on the table worth it?