The Bullet Shot Ages Ago

On decisions, drag, and playing long-term games

Every Decision Is a Bullet

Decisions are what your life is made of. Everything else is commentary.

Every decision is a bullet. You aim it at a target and pull the trigger. Sometimes you hit. Sometimes you miss. Sometimes the recoil hurts you and you miss anyway, which is the worst deal on the menu.

Some bullets are small. Should I get coffee today? Some aren’t. Should I put money in stocks for the next ten years? Same trigger. Very different endpoints.

Some bullets are aimed at people. Should I invest my time and effort in this person? That’s a high-risk, high-reward shot, and when it goes wrong you feel the recoil. Sometimes it arrives when the bullet lands, like learning a partner had ill will toward you. That hurts. It also teaches. And recoil isn’t always bad. Invest $200 today and you have $200 less to spend today. You feel the kick. It’s the kick of a good shot.

Trajectory

Here’s the part nobody tells you: bullets don’t fly straight. Once fired, a decision has a trajectory. How long until it lands? How hard will it hit? Will it hit at all? It can twist, turn, and take longer than you planned. Every target has its own clock. Wait too long and the bullet decays before it gets there. Pull out too early and it never covers the distance.

Decay, for me, usually comes from analysis paralysis. I learned recently that you can be too patient. I spent about a year with a woman because I was being patient with her. Patience looked like a virtue. It was actually a decision, and not a good one. I should’ve acted earlier and set boundaries. So how do you tell patience from decay? You don’t, at first. You learn it on the fly, you get it wrong, and you adjust. That’s the tuition.

Pulling out too early, I’ve done that too. I bought Google at around $50, watched it triple in a year, and sold it all. Sounds smart. It wasn’t. I paid taxes on the gain and then watched the stock go on to 5x my position. The target hadn’t hit yet. I just stopped trusting the bullet.

The bullet I shot ages ago was my first real investment portfolio. Before that, I was guessing: relying on luck and playing short-term games. Building a portfolio was the first time I chose a system over a guess. That bullet is still in the air, and it has hit more than one target along the way. Some bullets do that. It gave me the resources and the confidence to fire others, like getting into real estate, a different target on a medium-term clock.

Learning to Shoot

Yes, the bullet is a blatant metaphor. I’m aware. Shooting is deciding. And there are only two ways to learn to shoot accurately:

1. Pay someone to show you how to hit a specific target. Do it, rep it, trust it. (Costs money.)
2. Shoot, miss, adjust. (Costs time.)

You pay either way. You just pick the currency.

College is path one. You pay for mentorship from people in the industry, then get your reps in a structured, progressive way. Cheap certifications are a different animal. You learn a few things, but you still start in the industry at zero and build the experience yourself. To me, that’s the balance point.

Poker is path two. I’m learning it to get better at making decisions under pressure. You learn a lot. You also lose a lot. Those two facts are related.

Both paths pay you something, but path two pays in a currency that never shows up on paper: life experience. You can go to college to become a better decision maker, or you can build your own tuition out of life. A transcript won’t show what it’s like to put your money where your mouth is. It won’t show the independence of knowing you can survive anything.

Drag

The bullet isn’t always headed where people think it is. They watch your decision hang in the air in slow motion and think, wow, that’s dumb. When I told people I was getting into poker, I heard it: “Are you trying to become the next great poker player? The chances of that are so low.” They’re right. The chances are low. They’re also answering a question I never asked. The target simply isn’t theirs to see. For me, the win was never a bracelet. The win is becoming a better decision maker under pressure. That one I’m hitting.

Other people’s opinions are part of the air the bullet travels through. I call it drag, the physics term for wind resistance and the other forces that slow an object moving through a medium. Drag doesn’t change your target. It just makes the shot harder. One more layer of the onion: make the decision, let time compound, hit the target. Sometimes the stakes are ordering the wrong coffee. Sometimes they’re your financial future and the whole shape of your life.

My best friend told me his ex mocked me because I preach finances and I’m not a millionaire yet. Fair. I’m not a millionaire yet. He then told her that I paid off my mom’s house, bought my own house, and have six figures liquid. She was judging the bullet by where it is right now, not where it’s headed or what it’s aimed at. Great things take time. They aren’t snapshots.

Long-Term Games

Play long-term games with long-term people. Those are the people you want around at the end of the day.

But every system needs an energy source. So what powers the long-term game? Short-term people. Their bad calls, and the bullets they never fire, are decisions all the same. Those decisions become fuel for whoever is playing longer. The person who sells too early funds the person who held. The person who never invested funds the person who got in first. Not many people understand that.

There’s no good or bad here. It’s just how systems work. We eat animals because they give us the energy to produce value. Energy is never created or destroyed, only transferred. The only question is which way it flows: toward you, or away from you.

Long-term people can only be identified by their actions. The boring person who buys real estate at good prices and moves slow. The analyst you can’t rush. The person who thinks before they speak. They’re deliberate, and they’re playing long-term games. Watch what people do, because nowadays anybody can say anything. Talk is free, which is roughly what it’s worth, and it’s the salesman’s home turf. It muddies the water.

Survive the Miss

When I shot my first life-changing bullet, I was uncertain. Like with physical training, I had to trust the process. Life is uncertain, and you do the best with what you’ve got. So focus on the decision and the process, not the outcome. Outcomes are feedback. They tell you how to adjust the trajectory.

What doesn’t kill you does make you stronger. The fine print is the “doesn’t kill you” part. How big a bullet can you afford to fire? Some of that you only learn from life experience. Some of it you can borrow from people who already paid for the lesson. Read The Black Swan and the rule comes through loud and clear: never take the bet that can kill you. Miss as much as you want. Just make sure every miss is survivable.

Life is one big shooting range. Countless bullets are being fired, but you’re the only one who can see your target, and you’re the only one who can pull the trigger. There are a lot of variables. Your job is to build the skill to hit your targets consistently. The more long-term targets you hit in the right time frames, the higher the quality of life you’ll live.

It’s all so simple, right?