How seriously must you take...

 ....yourself and everything else in life? 

I ended one of my previous posts by writing nobody is going to make you feel relevant if you are not going to feel relevant yourself,  nobody is going to make you feel important if you don't feel important yourself. 

And that's true about taking yourself seriously too- nobody is going to take you seriously if you don't take yourself seriously enough ( now how much of enough is enough is a seperate question). And that means to some extent, you do need to take yourself seriously ( but not too seriously either maybe,  will come to that).

What about the other things in life? Career,  people,  hobbies,  status... you know stuff like that?

In an other post,  i mentioned "its all about allocation.". And that's a good thumb rule. The more serious you take something,  the more time you allocate to it. This means two things simultaneously- if you take something remotely seriously,  you need to give time to it.  The converse is also true, if you are giving a lot of time to something,  you are implicitly giving a lot of importance to it,  whether you realize it or not.

A finance analogy here is in order:  at a 0.1% allocation of your portfolio to something,  its just a hope trade or a gamble- or something which isn't a big position now but might evolve to be so in future;(some people call these as tracking positions). Now the point here is unless there are outsized gains, most of these individually no matter how well or how badly they do, it doesn't impact your fortunes either positively or negatively materially. So in the larger scheme of things, you can't have too many of these-  it isn't where you have too much skin in the game or commitment

At a 3-5% allocation, it is meaningful but one of the many things in a diversified pool of things that you are getting on.  At a 8-10%, you are taking a significant outsized bet on it.  At 30-40% , your fortunes are linked to it. 

The same holds true for the " time allocation" too in your life.  Take career.  Assuming you intend to spend 9 hours a day for 5 days a week, 200 days plus a year, for 35-40 years of life , that's a lot of time you are allocating to it by default.  If you intend to do that much time allocation, yes you are taking it very seriously indeed. The partner you plan to spend atleast 40 50 years with , again that's a whole lot of time allocation.  So these are things you are indeed taking seriously. ( the examples chosen here might seem captain obvious in any case but there's a broader subtler point here)

The implicit thing is that you are making a significant "commitment" of a resource here- time.  What does that mean and when do you actually do that? ( in a generalized sense, not specific to the examples mentioned)

What does it imply? let's go back to the finance analogy, Anything that you make a 40% allocation in a porfolio, the impact on your portfolio if something goes wrong, can be catastrophic. So you need to make those implicit choices on where you allocate your time or what you take seriously,  carefully. Further you would like it if something where you allocate a significant portion of your capital is something that you can atleast influence to whatever extent possible. Think of a  shareholder with a reasonable stake in a  company ( 40% of your net worth is one way to look at it but the relevant metric here is what % of the company,  maybe a 2-5% stake ?), an employee with significant ESOPs etc ( which can also turn"golden handcuffs" for the very reason)  Even better if its a "two way commitment" , for e.g for a promoter who holds 50% stake in a company and its 80% of his own portfolio. ( the partner analogy is also a good example of two way commitment). In two way commitments your fortunes become interlinked.

Where do you not commit so much? Pretty much everywhere else to varying extents. One example is where there are too many external factors beyond your control.  Where the external environment is too unstable or volatile. In all these cases,  you "hedge", or diversify. 

Which means you still commit or allocate quite a lot of time ( or money) to it -You take it seriously, very seriously even sometimes, but are willing to let go ( without catastrophic or super material consequences) for a "price"- or if the "external environment" changes in a manner that you need to cut your losses.

The other implicit point here is that of tradeoffs. Both in finance and in life, there are always tradeoffs. There are tradeoffs to allocation- or to how seriously you take things.  You may like two stocks a lot, but if you are giving 40% allocation to each of them,  then that means you can only give 20% to everything else. Or if you give 60% allocation to one of them, it means the allocation to the other has to be even mathematically lower. Likewise,  there are tradeoffs to the time you allocate or how seriously you take things. Super serious about something necessarily means substantially lower commitment to other things.

So coming back to the question,  how seriously do you take various things in life? Well one part is about the thumb rules above on what to take super seriously, slightly less seriously and so on, The other is the point that there are only so many things you can take seriously and super seriously. At the same time,  just like a porfolio in cash would underperform, or a super diversified porfolio can't outperform, you also need some decently material  "allocations" in life. Everything can't be a meaningless "tracking position".  Things that act as anchors- a reasonable allocation. But the fact is you have to be super selective on how many such things you anchor yourself to,  because there is only so many things that can be anchors, given the tradeoffs. 

The bulk of your allocation has to be or infact by implication,  WILL be , things that you take reasonably seriously but also are willing to let go for a price.  A small portion to things that you are willing to run as "hope trades" or tracking positions , where you hope that those things become bigger,  or just for the non material kick of being proven right or being happy etc.

 And So to summarize the answer on what are the things you take seriously and how seriously you take them,  the ideal mix - 

1 or 2 real big "allocations", things you take super seriously,

the bulk and many of them in material allocations, things you take reasonably seriously,  that both act as temporary anchors but ones which you are willing to let go for a price and

the remaining small portion in the "tracking positions/ hope trades"

P.S: 

( A digression : there's a field in finance called behavioural finance, where, based on the ways in which people or groups of people or society behave or how real world operates- i.e not necessarily super rationally, you model for example how asset prices move. Being socially well not so observant (if you are being euphemistic, or inept if you are being harsh), I guess I often do the reverse, take insights from the world of finance and markets to think about the ways in which people behave, or the way in which the world operates or should operate or on to real life in general!)