Let us assume your current financial needs were covered by income from a job/business or investments and you had the following two choices:

1. Work on a project for a year that had an excellent chance of earning you an extra $100,000.
2. Spend a year learning Internet, communication and entrepreneurial skills, (which probably would not earn you any extra money during the first year.)

Which would you select?

The first option, (Jerry McGuire’s “Show Me the Money!”) would seem to be a logical choice. However, before jumping in, I would suggest that you look at the potential OPPORTUNITY COST of that choice. Especially when you compare it to the opportunity cost and potential revenue stream from the second choice. Depending on where you want to be in 5 or 10 years, the second choice may be the least expensive one for you. Especially if you have any inkling about how you might leverage what you learn during that year to generate much MORE revenue.

Numerically, if you ended up making an extra $1,000,000 over your lifetime, after taking a year to learn as described in the second choice above, the opportunity cost of $100,000 in the first choice would be $1,000,000, giving you a net loss of $900,000. Now, opportunity cost is one of those hard-to-measure costs, but simply asking yourself the question “What is the opportunity cost of this choice?” will improve how you make decisions.

Carpe diem,

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The popular quote “God is in the details” conveys well the essence of this principle.

The idea is that the more you pay attention to the details of a goal, project, your life, body, environment, ideas, trends, changes, etc., the sooner and better you’ll be able to do something with it. Of course, there IS more than that to this concept; and future posts in this series should paint the entire picture of this very, very important concept.

Details, Systems and Big Picture: what’s the ratio? “Think globally, act locally.” This popular quote supports the idea of focusing primarily on the micro aspect of your project or goal, instead of mostly on the big picture. If I could create a magic formula, I’d come up with something like 50% micro, 48% system, and 2% macro. Meaning that if you spend about 2% of your time understanding and expanding your bigger picture of things (macro), that the rest of the time can well be spent either improving/tweaking the details (micro) and/or installing systems to improve the details. The way to make the biggest difference is to make lots of little differences. However, that 2% macro focus is essential for the 98% micro actions to really be effective.

Carpe diem,