Chopping Ls is inevitable. Now what?

A life of perfect balance is a myth.

Hello guys,

Hope you are doing well. I’m okay, Alhamdulillah. Seen better days, seen worse days.

Yeah, you get it now. I feel close to the good days though, so a little push and we’re good good. By the way, I totally love doing these illustrations. I tell myself I’m trying to help people understand but nah, they’re just really fun to do. Don’t judge me. 😜

Okayy, let’s get to the newsletter.

You know how we all know someone who just breezes through life and racks up wins? School/career? check. Deen? check. Family? check. Money? check. Relationships? check. Just about every other thing? check.

I can think of a few of them already. You know what? They probably suck at many other things. They probably chop even more Ls than we do.

How do I mean?

Apart from F1 and HIMYM, I spend a lot of my time thinking about opportunity cost. If you do a quick Google search on ‘opportunity cost’, you will see ‘the loss of other alternatives when one alternative is chosen’.

What does this mean?

It basically means resources are finite, and for everything you are doing, there is something you are not doing. For example, if you watch the English Premier League, you might be in a scenario where both Arsenal vs Chelsea and Man United vs Man City are playing on the same Saturday at 4 pm. If you watch the Arsenal game, you’re missing out on the United game. If you watch the United game, you’re missing out on the Arsenal game. One might argue that you could be switching between the two all through, but you would miss some important parts anyway.

Back to opportunity cost. If a young person decides after university to spend the next 5 years trying to get a PhD, then their opportunity cost would be 5 years of the income, experience, and network they would have received if they had started their career immediately. Get it?

When you transfer the concept of opportunity cost across all aspects of your life, it begins to become very interesting.

So if you’re in a relationship with person A who is a 52% fit for you, then you’re losing out on a potential relationship with person B who could be an 80% fit for you. Because in an ‘ideal’ scenario, you can only be with one person at one time.

(Yoruba boys are exceptions to the rule 🤐)

Now hopefully, you begin to see that anybody that is doing exceptionally well at one thing is likely racking up Ls in some other areas you can’t see.

A couple of years ago, me and my bro Oghena got kicked out of Enactus for being useless members of the team. I laugh every time I remember it. 😅

When we joined Enactus (a global student organization at the intersection of entrepreneurship and non-profit), we were seen as the ‘smart Engineering students’ that would help our unit bring some ideas to life. They had been working on some sort of smart walking stick that would help blind people with mobility. I don’t even remember the exact details of the device, but I remember that they had been stuck and were confident that we would somehow produce a prototype.

That meeting went something like this.

‘You guys can do it abi?’

‘Ehn let us do the research and see’

‘Shebi both of you are on 1st class?’

‘Erm, yes’

‘Great. You’ll just use Autocad and Inventor to design it so we can produce it. Shebi you know AutoCad and Inventor?’

‘yeah..’

‘Great, just do the design before the next meeting. We don’t really have Engineering people at the moment so we’re glad you are here’

‘Okay no problem’

The meeting came to a close. Oghena and I waited for everyone else to leave, then we laughed at ourselves for 5 minutes. 🤣

There was zero chance we were going to design anything. Not that we didn’t know how to (we actually didn’t know how to), but there was no way we were going to spend the bulk of our week working on the Enactus walking stick.

Opportunity cost. By spending our time on Enactus, we would have been falling short in the other 2 billion things we were involved with. So we stalled. We avoided the meetings, never designed anything, and were eventually kicked out of the team. Fun times. 😅

*** disclaimer: I am not saying this is the right thing to do, but ah well.

Now if you ask someone that was on that team for their impression of me and Oghena, they would likely say we are some of the most useless and irresponsible people to walk the earth. But if you ask some other people we have worked with, you will likely hear praise for our excellent skills and dedication.

A life of achievement and perfect balance in all things is a myth.

That person in your office that arrives at 6:30 am and closes at 9:30 pm might be a superstar at work, but is likely dropping some balls at home. He is probably unable to contribute at home (chores etc) or invest time into his relationship with his spouse or kids. There is always a trade-off.

So what do we do?

I am a big advocate of personalized solutions i.e. what is best for me is not what is best for you. We all need to start by figuring out what is most important to us, and then prioritizing our activities and resources to ‘win’ at those commitments. Everything else is a distraction.

I have a few more stories to share, but I need to take my own advice. The more time I spend on this newsletter, the less likely it is that I will complete all the other things I need to do today.

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If you found this newsletter useful, please share it with your friends. Have them read it and subscribe. I like to share personal stories and life lessons I am learning. They will be super random, but common themes will include business, personal development, human relationships, and Islam.

Gracias, and see you around.

Hameed