Published: November 09, 2023
The thought of creating a personal brand, building an audience, and curating content that is relevant to what I care about and research is more tempting than ever.
I think that there is a case for me to take time out of my days to share my views and expertise on different subjects that I’m well versed in, as I might genuinely create value for some of my readers (I’ll define what I mean by create value later).
However I view time as my scarcest (and most valuable) commodity, and taking time out of my research, studies, side projects, job search, etc, etc, etc in order to curate my thoughts is often hard to justify in my own mind.
Either choice seems a no-brainer. I should start curating content because:
However, it’s a bad idea to start curating content because:
While thinking about this, I came up with an idea:
We are all familiar with the sunk cost fallacy: our tendency to follow through on something if we are already invested in it. To this fun concept, I raise: the sunk cost opportunity.
On any given week, I spend tens of hours researching random topics. Some weeks I read publications on the effect on noise machines on sleep, some other weeks I’ll sink time into building a “smart” business card for no apparent benefit, at other times I will code an emulator to learn Rust.
These are all endeavours that feed my constant research for knowledge. They are almost therapeutic. They keep me sharp. They keep me updated on current events. They even train my ability to pivot from one project to another quickly–a nice switch up from the semester or year-long projects that I’m faced with in my school or research.
Point is: I am already at peace with committing 7 hours of my week researching the effects of white noise on my sleep. I do it for fun. Those hours are a cost that I’m willing to sink at any time of my life–there is no friction at all in spending them however I see fit.
Naturally, after this realization, my next thought was: why don’t I spend another 20 minutes on top of those 7 hours curating a simple blog post, a thread on twitter, or even simply a well-written journal entry that no one but me will read?
This is the essence of the sunk cost opportunity: how can I create the most amount of value from cost that is already “sunk” in order to generate an asymmetrically large outcome.
how can I create the most amount of value from cost that is already “sunk” in order to generate an asymmetrically large outcome.
I’m not going to spend 4 hours researching something just to publish it to my audience. I’m not a writer, philosopher, or influencer, however I’m perfectly ok with spending 30 minutes writing about something that I already commit hours to for others reasons. That’s perfectly reasonable in my head.
This way I’m also sure to create value. There surely is someone else like me, who has the same thirst for knowledge in similar topics, who will enjoy not having to spend 7 hours researching the effect of white noise on sleep. Someone who would rather read my blog post about it and invest his weekly personal-research hours into something else.
On the other side of things, there will also be someone that reads what I have to say and chooses to go on an even deeper dive, however that person will now have a good starting point.
These are the archetypes of people that I’m creating value for: the student in my same position who will now be able to devote his hours to something else. The kid that is trying to get in the same intersection of CS and Biology as me and that won’t need to go through as many hurdles to get to where I’m at. Or the person that reads my content and chooses that they want to delve deeper into the subject.
I find content valuable if:
And my content is aimed at provoking the same outcome in other people.
I find content valuable if it saves me hours of time or of it makes me waste hours of time researching more about. No in-between.
PS: This is a great read that in part motivated me to write this. His whole blog is great.