Latest / YINWorldWide / The Cost of Keeping Your Options Open
Transcript
- YIN: Before we get into today, I believe it's time that I reintroduce myself. My name is Ayinde Myself and my business partner spent years building a very successful business, and one thing that it taught me is how much of what I thought I knew was wrong. This show exists because I think there are things in life we move through too quickly. Things we accept as wisdom without stopping long enough to ask whether they're actually helping us. And one of those things is keeping our options open. Having options sounds like freedom. And sometimes it is. But I've started asking a different question. Is there a point where protecting every possible future starts preventing you from fully building the one that you already chose? Because there's something strange that happens when you always know you can leave. You enter differently, you commit differently, you tolerate uncertainty differently. You can be present somewhere while still keeping part of yourself somewhere else. watching the other doors, protecting the exit, and that can feel intelligent. Until you realize that some things only become valuable after leaving becomes expensive. Keeping options open usually doesn't feel like fear. It feels responsible. An option gives you somewhere else to go if things stop working. It can give you leverage, protect you from desperation, and make uncertainty easier to tolerate. There is wisdom in that. But there is a difference between knowing an exit exists and needing to constantly reassure yourself that you can still use it. Think about this. Two people have been together for years. Nothing catastrophic has happened. They're just in a difficult season. More disagreements, less patience. Life has become heavier. After one of those arguments, one person is lying awake next to somebody they know extremely well. They know how this person responds when they're tired. They remember the disappointments. They know the habits that used to seem insignificant. And they know how to get under their skin. And somewhere in that frustration, they begin imagining someone else. Not necessarily a specific person, just someone easier. Someone who understands them without all the friction. but the comparison is already unfair. The person lying next to them has had to survive reality. The alternative hasn't. That imaginary person has never had to navigate financial stress with them. Misunderstand what they meant, forget something important, or carry years of changing expectations. The alternative gets to remain perfect because the alternative has never had to become real. The same thing can happen when work becomes frustrating. cleaner. A new idea feels A new idea feels easier than the difficult stage of the thing you already built. The open door becomes more attractive when the room you are standing in becomes uncomfortable. That creates a strange problem. Reality has to compete against possibility, and possibility has an enormous advantage. Picture someone sitting on their couch late at night looking at apartments in another city. Maybe work has been frustrating. Maybe life has started to feel repetitive. They begin imagining the neighborhood, a different routine, people they've never met. Maybe they would become a different version of themselves there. And maybe moving really would improve their life. But the comparison is incomplete. They know everything that frustrates them about where they live now. The commute, the loneliness, The expectations that never became reality. But they don't know what a random Wednesday feels like in another city. They haven't had a bad boss there. They haven't struggled to build friendships there. they haven't found out what problems will pack a bag and move with them. The possibility remains clean because it has not accumulated any consequences yet. Imagination gets to hide the bill. and that matters because many meaningful things become ordinary before they become deep. a relationship eventually becomes familiar. A skill becomes repetitive. A business reaches a point where the exciting ideas turn into operations, payrolls. customers and problems that need to be solved again tomorrow. that change can feel like evidence that something has gone wrong. Sometimes it is, but sometimes you have simply reached a part where novelty stops carrying you. and now another possibility appears at exactly the right moment. Fresh. untested still mostly potential. This is where keeping an option open can start changing the way you experience what you already have. Because difficulty contains information, but difficulty is not always information itself. Sometimes it means something needs to change. Other times you're simply experiencing what it feels like when something stops being new. When every difficult season has an available exit, discomfort can start feeling like a signal when it may only be a season. We usually evaluate optionality by looking at what it preserves. What could I still do if this doesn't work? Where else could I go? What other possibilities remain available? but that only measures one side of the decision. The other side is much harder to see. What does keeping the option alive prevent from developing? Because many of the things we value most require continuity before their value becomes obvious. Think about trust. you cannot create ten years of trust by having one extraordinary conversation. It accumulates through smaller moments. Someone says that they'll show up and they do. And eventually you stop evaluating each individual moment because the history itself begins carrying the weight. And expertise works the same way. A mistake that you make today may seem like nothing more than a mistake. Five years from now, that expertise may allow you to recognize something before everybody else sees it. That is compounding. Yesterday changing the value of what you can do today. Relationships do it. Reputation does it. A sense of belonging can do it. But none of them can happen instantly. They require constant work. You have to remain somewhere long enough for previous investments to begin affecting future returns. That doesn't mean staying forever. It means acknowledging that some things cannot reveal their full value while you are still constantly deciding whether they deserve another month. But there is something underneath all of this that I think is even more interesting. Maybe sometimes we keep options open because we don't want an answer. Because completely choosing something allows reality to test the choice. Pursue the career far enough, and you might discover that you are not as exceptional as you believed. Build the company and eventually the market gets a vote. Commit deeply enough to a relationship. And you may have to confront what it actually is rather than what you imagined it would become. Those answers can be uncomfortable. incomplete commitment can protect us from them. because if we never completely choose, there is always another explanation available. I could have done it. I just never really tried. Maybe I could have made it work, but I went in another direction. There is safety in the saying could have. Because could have cannot be disproven. Potential that has never been tested can remain perfect. And maybe that is why some options become so difficult to close. They stop being alternatives and they become identities. A version of you who started the company, a version who left. A version who moves somewhere else or chose somebody different, those people can continue existing in your imagination for as long as you never force them to confront reality. And maybe there is a comfort in that. Because closing the door does not just mean losing an option. Sometimes it means accepting that you are never going to find out who you would have been on the other side of it. That is a very difficult kind of loss. We tend to talk about commitment as though the biggest risk is choosing incorrectly. But even a good decision eliminates possibilities. You can choose correctly and still wonder about another life. Eventually, a life has to move from possibility into form, and form requires limits. You cannot give your entire life to five different versions of yourself. At some point, some possible futures have to die so one of them has enough resources to become real. None of this means staying is automatically the right decision. Sometimes the exit is there because you should take it. People outgrow careers, relationships change, companies stop making sense, places stop fitting the person you have become. New information matters. I've had to think about this in my own decisions. Because commitment and stubbornness can look very similar when you're standing inside of them. One question. That I've always come back to is this. What evidence would actually change my mind? Because if the answer is nothing, I may not be committed anymore. I may simply be attached to being right about the original decision, but there is an opposite problem. If every period of doubt is enough to reopen the decision, nothing receives enough continuity to become deep, and anything meaningful eventually gives you reasons to reconsider it. Novelty disappears, you get disappointed, something else catches your attention. The circumstances that existed when you first chose it change. That is where choosing and investing separate. choice happens once. Investment happens again tomorrow. It happens when the excitement is gone and when another possibility becomes available. not because you should blindly keep choosing the same thing, but because some returns only become visible after enough decisions have accumulated in the same direction. keeping your options open isn't inherently wise or inherently dangerous. There are periods of life when exploration is necessary. There are decisions where more information matters. And there are doors you should absolutely walk through when the evidence tells you something has changed. But there can also be a point. Where an open door stops being something you may need later and starts influencing the way you live now. It changes what you're willing to invest, what you're willing to endure, what you allow enough time to become deep. and that can be difficult to recognize because the alternative may still look good. The other path does not have to be terrible for you not to take it. The other life does not have to be meaningless for you not to live it. Sometimes you are simply deciding which possibility gets enough of your life to become real. Because some of the things we say we want cannot be built with whatever attention remains after we finish protecting every alternative. some things only become valuable after leaving becomes expensive. is the door you're keeping open still protecting your future? Or is it protecting you from finding out what the life you already chose could become? This is Yin. If this resonated, share with someone who needs to hear it. Not everyone, just someone who's ready. You can find Yin Worldwide Podcast on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. If you want to go deeper, visit our website at liveyin.com. Subscribe if you're committed to the work. If not, that's fine too. This isn't for everyone. Remember, move with intention.