4 Underrated Personality Traits You Need to Live Your Best Life
1. Detachment (Being okay when life sucks)
We flip a coin. Heads, you get $100,000. Tails, you get nothing. Or, I give you $10,000, no questions asked. Do you flip the coin or take the money? Most people would pick the $10,000, saying it’s “the obvious choice,” but it’s not. It’s just more certain — and humans love certainty.
The math of the coin toss is that you have a 50% chance to walk home with $0 and an equal chance of winning $100,000. A statistician would say, “This gamble has an expected value of $50,000.” If we replayed this experiment endlessly, choosing the coin toss each time would maximize your earnings.
As a one-off decision, however, the element of uncertainty makes the gamble less attractive — so much so that you’re willing to sacrifice $40,000 of the expected payout just to get a sure outcome. The $40,000 is called risk premium — the additional return you can expect for bearing uncertainty — and even though the numbers are contrived, you’ll often get similarly outsized rewards in life if you hang on a little longer when the future is unclear.
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