A Big Fish in a Small Pond: for many years I assumed it was better to be a big fish in a small pond than to try to be a big fish in the ocean. This can be decomposed into a series of mistakes, only part of which I learned to overcome so far.

1)It is based on the premise that social rankings matter more than they actually do. Most of day to day life is determined by environment, and being in a better environment, surrounded by better and different people is more valuable experientially and in terms of output than being a big fish in a small pond.

2)It encouraged blindspots. The more dimensions in which I was the big fish, the more dimensions nearby in vector space I failed to optimize. The most starking one: having a high linguistic IQ and large vocabulary made me care little about grammar and foreign languages.

3)One of the reasons for me to want to be big at a small pond was reading positive psychology showing most people prefer a 50k income in a 25k average world than a 75k in a 100k average. I was unable to disentangle "empirical study", which serves to inform me into two very distinct sets. "Empirical study about how people actually feel in different situations" and "Empirical study about how people judge abstract counterfactual situations with numbers attached to them". I was very proud of taking science seriously into my life (which in fact most people don't), but I was taking the part of science that is specifically about people being wrong without noticing, in my reckless youth.

4)It has a unidimensional function Max(deltaBigness) which doesn't capture the complexity and beauty of our actual multidimensional lives and feelings. There are millions of axes in which it is personally valuable to nudge, to push, to move, and to optimize, relative importance is a relatively unimportant one.