## Metadata * URL: [https://eriktorenberg.substack.com/p/reconsidering-career-optionality](https://eriktorenberg.substack.com/p/reconsidering-career-optionality) * Published Date: 2022-05-29 * Author: [[erik-torenberg|Erik Torenberg]] ## Highlights * The average ambitious person spends too much time accumulating optionality and too little time taking actual risks with high upside potential for themselves or the world. * Ambitious people compete insanely hard to accumulate options for the future, instead of figuring out what they really want to do and doing it. * The long-term capital gains tax rate is significantly lower than the income tax rate, which means that the startup option has a higher expected payoff than the FAANG job. ISOs aren’t taxed until you sell your shares. * if you can get into a top tier accelerator program as a founder, your odds of becoming a billionaire are 1 in 40, low, but high enough that the expected value of attending a top tier accelerator program is $25 million. * what if you could play that 100 times? * **Note**: But the shit is that you probably cannot play 100 times. You need to make sure you can keep up playing (this is probably mentioned by [[Nassim nicholas taleb|Nassim Nicholas Taleb]] too)