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🌱 Are you GOING FOR IT or coasting?
Modern wisdom. Dysmorphia of time & risk. Reality vs perception.
Mitchell Cohen
October 05, 2025
Here’s your 3 insights in 3 minutes.
As an experiment, I recorded a video version of this week’s newsletter!
Let’s dive in.
đź’Ş Modern Wisdom
This week I went to Chris Williamson’s event and this line has been stuck in my head ever since:
“Work as hard as you possibly can on at least one thing and see what happens.”
It hit me because I’ve had seasons where I was doing the opposite.
For example, high school football is one that comes to mind. I was on the the team, but never went all-in. I coasted, half-committed and never put in the work to get better. For that reason, it’s one of those regrets that still nags at me a little.
Half-committing costs double: your time and your chance to find out.
🤔 Dysmorphia
In 2019, an article went viral called Money Dysmorphia: Why I Can’t Let Myself Have Nice Things.
The author described sitting at lunch knowing she could afford the $17 burger, but still stewing in anxiety about spending.
Objectively she had plenty.
Subjectively she felt broke.
That mismatch between reality and perception is the real trap.
And I think we all have many versions of it:
Time Dysmorphia → We say “I don’t have time,” but the real problem isn’t hours, it’s energy and focus. (If you can scroll for 45 minutes, you can write for 15.)
Risk Dysmorphia → We only focus on the downside of the something not working, when in reality the worst case is often capped and the upside can be huge.
Bezos built Amazon by spotting this distortion. He said people consistently overestimate risk and underestimate upside. (See clip here.)
“It’s human nature to overestimate risk and under estimate opportunities…The risk is probably not as big as you perceive. And the opportunities maybe bigger than you perceive.”
His antidote was to look at life as a series of asymmetric bets:
“The difference between baseball and business, however, is that baseball has a truncated outcome distribution. When you swing, no matter how well you connect with the ball, the most runs you can get is four. In business, every once in a while, when you step up to the plate, you can score 1,000 runs.”
Most “risks” aren’t actually that risky, and the upside is way bigger than our brains perceive.
🧠Reality vs Perception
“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”
Our brains are masters at tricking us. Making small risks look huge and big opportunities look invisible.
But perception isn’t truth. It’s just the story your brain tells to keep you comfortable.
The work, then, isn’t to find more time or eliminate fear.
It’s to trust that inner pull and find out for yourself.
At 23, Jane Goodall made a life-defining leap following that instinct.
She left England alone to study animals in Africa — uninvited, uncredentialed, and uncertain of what she’d find.
Unconventional: Women didn’t typically travel solo to Africa in the 1950s.
Uncredentialed: She had no degree or formal training.
Uncertain outcome: Her only plan was, “Go to Africa and work with animals.”
Most people would’ve stopped at any of those.
But Jane saw something different.
That one act of trust reshaped how we understand the natural world.
Her discoveries about chimpanzees — their empathy, emotion, and use of tools — changed science forever.
As Thoreau said, “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”
What you see is what you feel.
And what you feel becomes the lens you live through.
So the question is, what do you feel?
Salud,
Mitchell