Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan and, more recently Antifragile, once described his approach to investing as the “barbell strategy”. The guiding principle behind this strategy is that most of your money is allocated to investments with little risk or downside, the type of dependable investments that reliably generate a modest return. They don’t promise anything impressive, but, more importantly, they don’t carry the risk of a substantial loss. Then, a small portion of your portfolio is placed in highly speculative accounts. These accounts are very risky, but, if they work out, the profit will be considerable. Essentially, you look for your profits in a very concentrated portion of your portfolio, and you buy the luxury of taking this risk by being very restrained with the rest of your money. The major alternative to which this strategy stands in contrast is the middle-of-the-road approach, the one that allocates all funds to investments with some moderate degree of risk and potential reward.

While not a perfect analogy, this investment philosophy fairly closely reflects the tack I’ve taken to life in general. The main idea is that I don’t try to do everything moderately well or with balanced results. Rather I address the vast majority of things by looking for a simple, adequate solution and not spending any more time or energy than necessary. Instead I concentrate my energy and attention on a small number of things that are exceptionally rewarding. While it’s natural to do this to some extent, the key, I’ve found, is to pursue this logic aggressively.

I’ve identified those few things that are really important to me and ruthlessly focused on those while abandoning any pretense of effort when it comes to the remaining things. I don’t just not put in special effort: I strictly confine myself to the bare minimum. I cycle through the same basic four sets of suits, shirts, and ties each week, and otherwise put little thought into my clothes. It’s not just that I don’t follow fashion trends and carefully put together outfits but that I do only about enough to meet social expectations. In total contrast, I direct an inordinate amount of time, energy, and money into a few things that I’m passionate about, such as exercising or reading. Again, it’s not just that I do these things more than chores but that I hyper-focus on them. So I look for my happiness in a tiny fraction of things that have the potential for amazing rewards rather than seeking a certain degree of fulfillment in all things. The result is that there’s overall satisfaction combined with the opportunity for extraordinary things from these privileged sources.

In general, it’s the half-hearted who suffer, the ones who are doing something without being fully committed. I learned this principle most dramatically when skateboarding. There, if you went for a dangerous trick with intent, most of the time you weren’t going to get badly hurt even if you didn’t land it, but if you weren’t fully committed to trying it, you ran the risk of really messing up. Choose your tricks, and go for them all out.