Explore or Exploit: The Hidden Decision that Guides Your Life

Time plays a crucial role in explore/exploit trade-offs.

If you have much more time to take advantage of new situations, you will have more likely to explore new things. But If time is limited, you will stick to the things you know the best.

For instance, children are the ultimate explorers. They’ll try things they’re bad at. In contrast, as we get older, we orient our lives around known rewards.

Being exposed to a particularly high-value opportunity early can trick our brains. It’s easy to prematurely exploit—choosing big tips at the expense of a better long-term career.

Be wary how you judge early successes or failures. Sometimes an early success can be a trap. Don't choose early successes at the cost of loosing your long term goals or passion.

Openess to new experiences seems correlated with exploration. Some people have such traits, while other's go for the safe bet.

More ambitious prople will likely to explore more, since their expectations from future rewards are much higher. This helps is turning down great opportunities and gigs.

More exploration isn't always good, having a space for exploration is more important, instead of exploring everytime. Our intuition about when to explore and when to exploit is fairly enough instead of formal analysis of both the options.

However, if such decisions are forced by sacrificing today's demands for trying something new, we may end up making wrong decisions.

Cultivating spaciousness itself isn’t easy. If you feel trapped, no platitude will open the world up instantly for you.

Instead, you can make small changes that slowly increase the space you have like, improve your finances, health and time management so that constraints which felt overwhelming loosen up a little.