PSTM: Loss Aversion, The Format, and a Bunch of Wine

The Idea: Avoiding failure is often more powerful than chasing success.

We all feel this. We’re wired to love gains (especially on a variable reward schedule) but there is something that moves us more: loss.

Loss aversion, fear of failure, sunk cost fallacy: they all point back to one thing: we hate losing.

This isn’t as stupid as it seems at the outset. For most of human history, it took only one misstep to lose everything. The one day you didn’t look is the day you slip and cut your leg open and the wound gets infected and you die. The one time you didn’t think twice about drinking that water gave you some ungodly poisoned death. The one time you don’t stay in a group you get eaten by the ravenous beasts in the night.

We lived for all of our history at the razor’s edge of life. We inherit a mind tuned to fear and loss, because only our ancestors who were wired that way made it. The rest were toast.

The Quote:

The Advice: There is a question that I’ve been using to overcome my fear of failure or anxiety around success. “What if you knew for sure you’d fail...what would you do anyway.”

If success or failure is off the table, if you know you’re gonna fail anyways, what would you do? What’s worth doing for you, in and of itself?

Go out and do some shit. Love you all!