You’re a prospector during the California gold rush. You approach a riverbed and see a few people in the area, so you head to an untouched area and start digging.

Lots of dirt, but no gold yet.

You keep digging.

Still, no gold.

No one else seems to have given up yet. What if the gold is just one more scoop of dirt below you?

So you keep digging.

The Prospector’s Trap #

I’m writing this after having just fallen into this trap. At work, we kicked off an evaluation period with a potential enterprise customer. My philosophy on closing this deal was:

“Every hour of work I put in for them has a 1% chance of improving our odds of making the sale.”

So, I must spend every hour I possibly can.

If we don’t get this sale, I’ll regret not trying hard enough. All these stories of startup founders grinding till 3am and working weekends to make their companies successful must be referring to this, right?

The Rat and the Lever #

That short-sighted, grinder mindset ignores the opportunity cost of not spending time on the next ten customers instead. If we end up making the sale anyway, the extra hours I spent obsessing over this one are wasted.

And that is what happened.

The way I try to avoid this trap now is to ask myself the question:

“Am I only doing this because it’s the easy thing to do?”

It’s easy to fix a bug. It’s hard to train our champion to convince their boss it’s worth the budget.

It’s easy to stay up late coding. It’s hard to generate a repeatable sales process that gives us ten more shots at companies like this one.

Sometimes, the right answer is to just spend that hour on a small fix. But at least consciously make that decision.

Exploit vs. Explore #

You climb out of your hole, exhausted. Even after hearing cries of gold from others around you, you can’t bring yourself to dig anymore.

You climb up on your mound of dirt and look around, scoping out your next spot for tomorrow. All the others are tired and dirty too, but still digging.

Hm. At some point, these guys will need some new jeans.

References #

The Rat and the Lever refers to classic addiction studies where rats with electrodes implanted in their brain’s pleasure centers would compulsively press a lever for stimulation, sometimes to the point of exhaustion or starvation.

Exploit vs. Explore - This whole post reminds me of the Multi-armed bandit problem, where even the most shrewd Reinforcement Learning algorithms will still occasionally explore the space.