This is another life/investing lesson that has proved to be immensely helpful to me in certain situations. There have been many times in my life, where I’ve stumbled upon an opportunity where, for whatever reason, I feel like I’m too late for peak returns, but actually I’m quite early.

For example, I was quite certain that I was late in choosing a Computer Science degree. Google was ~9 years old when I graduated, Microsoft was ancient, etc. I still went ahead because I loved it, but I didn’t expect to make any serious financial returns. But I’ve only enjoyed the wave of economic prosperity as these skills continued to have increased demand over the past decade and a half.

There are similar cases in my life for moving cities (moving out of India, moving back to India), making investments (equities, crypto), learning skills (Python), etc. Now, whenever I catch myself thinking “it’s not worth it, I’m too late”, I remind myself that even if I’m too late, what is the bare minimum I can do to enjoy returns from being early if the opportunity hasn’t peaked yet? And then I try to at least do that bare minimum to enjoy any upside, if there is some in the future. Often times, because you are too close to a new trend, you feel like you’ve missed the boat, but you just can’t contemplate how early you are.

Right now, I feel similarly for developments in AI. I’m going to spending some significant effort on upskilling my knowledge around it in the next few months, because even though AI echo chambers are everywhere, I still feel we’re in the early days.