| These kinds of article push me over the edge. They introduce just enough to be dangerous, but not enough to be useful in order to sell you a book and course which will be more of the same bad quality content. In the article they define the edge as the transition zone between the comfort zone and the danger zone. And they more or less directly tell you to push it and stretch it with care. The proper underlying concept is risk management. ** If you follow the advices of these kind of articles, you typically see an initial success, followed by occasional bigger successes, followed by occasional crashes, followed by unrecoverable crashes. What is happening is that the underlying problem that you are trying to optimize initially benefits from expanding your comfort zone. People usually are too "safe" to begin with. That's called prudence, it's a good thing that has been hardwire by evolution. But then when you work to push your frontier zone, you work in a zone where pulling and pushing lever have maximum sensitivity, it's good and allow you to make some quick progress. You learn the good moves which rock is slippery to your foot or not, but slipping is not to important because you are still working inside the underlying safe operating zone. But now you are getting used to learning with immediate feedback. And if you make this the thing you optimize for, you will slowly drift toward the more danger and less reward zone. You master pushing and pulling the levers in front of you but as you already know how they work, you don't learn anything new. So you push them more and more because you get bored, and then you get some exciting new phenomenon, the car can drift when you go over 90 in the turn of the speed limit 50 zone. So you're happy you've got something new to master. You master it, and now you drift anywhere you go Tokyo drift style. But you never learned that the adherence of the car depends on whether it has rained the previous day because the oil and dust in the asphalt get lifted and redeposited on the road. So you are surprised when your car spin around. You got in an accident but made it OK, but now you've got to do some door dashing to finance the new car. So you are more tired, and more pressed by time and drive accordingly. So what does little Timmy in the back learn ? ** Proper risk management is looking for the levers you can push, expanding them in a safe and boring way.
It's concept like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficient_frontier in portfolio management instead of YOLOing.
It's the concept of bankroll management, and management of variance, aggression window style, in things like poker. But the game of life is not an individual one but a collective one. And people playing an aggressive style are forcing you to play a more loose game. And even more worse than a loose game is a positive expectation game turned negative expectation game because of that. Because the game is not zero sum, in poker there is the rake, but in life many situations are win win, but can be turned lose lose by greediness. The rise is slow and the fall is fast and catastrophic, see the concept of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascading_failure in complex systems that result by taking a myopic approach to optimizing your life. |
However my personal experience is that it mostly doesn't work out like that. Real human interactions with others and with things is so complex that it can't reliably be modeled that way. In reality it is more a combination of gut feeling and rational overthought and afterthought, in a never ending feedback loop.