Be Specific, or Be Mediocre
Or even dead. Remember Buridan's Donkey.
Wanting the best without being specific leads to mediocrity.
This can happen make you waste time in your daily life, like wanting the best restaurant, car, coat, smartphone, or app.
But if you're not specific, how can you know what's the best for you? Because the best will never check all the boxes. So you have to determine what criteria is important to you, then make your decision based upon it. Overthinking, stagnation, analysis paralysis, mental depletion, and frustration occurs when you want to make the best decision, but haven't decided what best decision means exactly.
This is even more important in never ending games—games where there are no strict rules and pre-determined end. Like in business, be it investing, trading, or entrepreneurship. Or even relationships.
Rules and constraints breeds creativity, unlimited freedom stifles it.
When you're operating in a field where there are no clear limits— when the only rules that can exist are the one you set to yourself—it's easy to fall into the trap of wanting the best while staying vague in what it is you're trying to achieve. Wanting the best leads to overthinking, analysis paralysis, and a desire to keep as much possibilities open as possible. This means no clear boundaries, no clearly defined plan. You'll end up accepting less than what is worth to you, or keep moving the goalpost and never feeling satisfied.
True creativity is in the process, not in the goal-setting. It comes from making mistakes, learning from it, and adapting. Just look at nature. The most intelligent agent in the universe didn't arrive to what it is by grand design, but by constantly making mistakes and evolving.
Specificity leads to the right mistakes
How can you know you're making progress when you haven't clearly defined what progress or failure mean? Vagueness is the way of the delusional, wishful thinking. It lets you get away without ever really failing. It allows you to avoid making mistakes by constantly shifting the criteria or goalpost.
Avoiding being specific can lead to making less error, less frequently. But If you don't really make mistakes, you don't really learn. If you don't learn, you can't make progress. No progress, no growth, no evolution. No evolution means stagnation. And stagnation, since nothing in this world stays unchanging, means decay, and ultimately death, the death of your endeavors, relationship, or portfolio.
What does it have to do with my investing? For the longest time, I've been investing without a real plan. Pure wishful thinking. I would invest in stocks or crypto, and subconsciously [thinking to myself but without really putting it into words] aim for vague and unrealistic objectives, if I even had any. I'd buy some Bitcoin, without planning neither a price where I would get rid of it, nor a price where I'd sell it. I would just think that I'd figure out when to sell it in the future, when the price would reach a satisfying amount. But what is a satisfying amount? I couldn't tell you. And that was the problem. When you are not specific, nothing can be satisfying. If it reached $80k, how could I know if it's a good price to sell it or not? If I sell it, and it goes up to $90k, I would definitely smack myself up for having sold too soon. On the other hand, if my plan was to sell at $80k right from the beginning, I would have the satisfaction to have followed my plan, and that it played successfully. I would still have some frustration, but it would be more about my plan, which means I made a mistake in my forecasting. So I can learn and make new plans.
That's why writing down your plan is paramount. It forces you to be specific about your goal and have it predetermined, with clear, unambiguous criteria and rules to assess its achievement. Unless your'e also vague in your writing, but then it is pointless to write in the first place.
Coming up with a plan and writing it down also means you have to follow it. It is a crucial part. If you don't, it was a waste of time creating one. This can be the most difficult part, because it requires commitment. And commitment is scary. Are you afraid of commitment? It's also about discipline, but it's another topic. If you make a plan, commit to it. Only change your plan when it is proven wrong. But for it to be proven wrong, it has to be specific about what makes it wrong.