Keeping Your Options Open Is the Most Expensive Thing You Can Do
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You think you’re being smart by not committing. You’re not. Every door you keep open is energy you’re not spending on the door you walked through.
I spent two years of my life hedging.
I’d left my corporate career. The podcast was growing. The newsletter was gaining traction. The business was starting to look like a real business. But I hadn’t committed. Not fully. I was still taking consulting calls. Still saying yes to freelance projects that had nothing to do with what I was building. Still keeping one foot in the old world because the new world wasn’t guaranteed yet.
I told myself I was being smart. Diversifying my risk. Keeping options open in case the media business didn’t work out. Responsible. Practical. The kind of thing a reasonable person does.
What I was actually doing was splitting my energy across five things and giving none of them enough to succeed. The podcast got 60% of my attention. The consulting got 20%. The freelance projects got 10%. The remaining 10% went to anxiety about whether I was making the right choice. Which, when you break it down, means the thing I was supposedly building my future around was getting barely more than half of me.
And I wondered why it was growing slowly.
The moment everything changed wasn’t when I got a big break or found a growth hack or cracked some algorithm. It was when I killed the options. Stopped consulting. Stopped freelancing. Stopped hedging. Told myself: this is the thing. If it fails, it fails. But it gets all of me.
Within six months, the podcast doubled. Not because I got smarter. Because I stopped dividing.
The Optionality Trap
We live in a culture that worships optionality. Keep your options open. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Have a backup plan. The more choices you have, the better positioned you are.
This sounds wise. It’s actually a trap.
Because optionality has a cost. And nobody talks about the cost.
