We know this to be true. The grass is greener on the other side, you always think you could’ve done X if you weren’t doing Y etc etc.
Opportunity cost is real, but for some reason we tend to ignore it when estimating possibilities.
I’ve seen this at Google. People who’ve been here 8–10 years or more tend to say things like this:
- I founded X
- We have an IPO moment for product X
and so on. They say this in writing too, completely unironically.
Reading such notes always made me laugh. Still does. In any context.
Its funny how people who’ve actually founded companies and gone through IPOs would never say that while working for a company with 100,000+ people and billions in budget with 50,000 engineers that are on a payroll that _you_ dont have anything to do with.
You are operating in a sandbox, with full safety and very, very little risk.
These are funny things you see in corporate America. Chalk it up to that.
