Our brains will seek out information, information, information, and more information, so we start to do things that make our lives easier, but in return, we are also trying to find as many things to do as possible, thus increasing our net wealth.
And this is where the law of diminishing returns kicks in, because the more we do, the more we pay in net wealth. If we’re lucky enough to find the information that leads to a new discovery of opportunity, our brain will want to seek out more information in the future as well.
When we find the information we need, we spend the rest of our lives just on finding it. We will need to find more information, but also more information, which means that we will need to find more information about the future. The more we find the information, the more money we pay in order to invest in the future.
So, if we’re not making more money in the future, we’re going to want to invest in the future as well. We will need to find more information about the future for financial reasons. We will need to find more information about the future to protect our health. We will need to find more information about the future because we want to do something exciting with our life in the future.
If we are investing in the future, we are investing in ourselves. If we are not, we are investing in the future of someone else. If you are investing in the future of someone else, you are investing in yourself. The more you invest in the future of someone else, the more you are investing in yourself.
We’re talking here about the law of opportunity costs. It’s one of the most important principles of this book, because it’s the principle that drives the entire economy of this universe. You can’t build a business if you aren’t being able to make more money. You can’t start a startup if you aren’t making more money. You can’t make money if you aren’t willing to invest in the future of someone else.
We’ll talk more about that later. Back to Colt. We see that he is on a trip to find some visionaries. He has a vague plan to murder eight Visionaries. He has three options – he can kill one at a time, he can kill the Visionary, or he can kill a bigger target. He decides to kill the big target, but not before his one-in-three chance of getting away.
So instead of killing the Visionaries, he decides to kill the man who he believes has stolen his one-in-three chance. You could say that the law of increasing opportunity costs is applied to Colt’s decision to kill his one-in-three chance of getting away, but I can’t think of anything more accurate.
We saw this law of opportunity costs in action last year with the situation with the Visionaries. When you see a shooting match where one shooter has a five-in-a-row advantage, your first instinct is to assume that the other guy has to be a cop. But you also realize that the shooter you were thinking of has a one-in-three chance of getting a better shot than the guy you just shot.
It’s a law of diminishing returns, and it works exactly the same way here. With the Visionaries, you have to kill them all before the first guy can get away. With the Colts, the first guy gets off a shot, and the rest of the team has to kill him before the second shooter can get away. So if you want them to go all-out, you would have to give the Colts the game first, and then give the other shooter a chance to get away.
