Too Many Baskets, Not Enough Eggs?

”They” say that we it is wise to not put too many eggs in one basket.

To be honest, I have never had much of an issue with that! If anything, my issue in life is that I have invariably had too many baskets, and not enough eggs.

Perhaps an uncannily apt metaphor, in this United States, in the year 2025 when the price of a dozen eggs is on track to rival the price of gold.

I’m only being halfway facetious, there…

The point here, though, is that I have had a pervasive tendency to have so many ”backup plans” that I have been left with very little time, energy and resource to pursue what we might call ”the main event.”

Some would argue that I am reluctant to ”go all in” on whatever I am working on.

Again, there’s an uncomfortable truth to that, in the sense that I am more likely to go ”20% in, on five different things.”

Over the decades, I have poked around in my psyche extensively, trying to unravel my foibles and weaknesses. Here we find the fairly consistent belief that most things in life are FAR more likely to fail than to succeed… hence you’d be well served to give yourself lots of options and maybe one of them will fall someplace short of absolute disaster and loss.

I think back to a now distant past — yes, it was over eight years ago — when I joined Steemit and my expectation was that it would likely fail and be wiped off the surface of the planet within a couple of years, tops. As for people actually getting paid for content? What a joke! That ain’t never gonna happen!

OK, so I learned that when you have a decentralized system, there’s no company to go bankrupt… and that seemed kind of cool. Instead, I re-calibrated to an understanding that It was likely that the token price would end up trending towards zero within a few years.

Whereas that likely sounds very ”Negative Nancy,” it was rooted in a preceding 18 years of experience with online venues that purported to pay contributors for online content, and of the 50 or so I had been part of 49 (at the time… it’s now all 50) had died sudden deaths, most of them very quickly.

Reflecting on this, I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that I might be a poor match for ”how things work” in this day and age, in this world of ours.

The thing is, there were a fair number of people who were quite successful on those very same web sites that paid people for their writing, but they all followed the same trajectory: Get in early, bust your butt creating a HUGE volume of (pretty thin) content, cash out after a few months and move on to a different venue before things head south.

Ironic, isn’t it?

Even though I have had too many baskets and not enough eggs, I absolutely loathe having to constantly move and change and start over. In my ideal world, I’d just be left alone to do one thing for years and years… and it ”should” be enough.

Except it never is, is it?

I ended up penning these words as I was resuscitating an old X/twitter account for one of my eBay businesses. While doing so, I was grateful that I had gotten involved in so many different things, because pretty much every single one of those original microbusinesses has slowly dried up.

Not because I didn’t work at them, mind you… but because the world changed and started moving faster than I do.

The conclusion I end up with — even though I find it both distressing and uncomfortable — is that the Life Cycle of almost everything gets shorter and shorter. Meaning — from my perspective — that you have less and less time to get GOOD at anything before it has become obsolete.

Quality vs. Speed, I suppose. I was always oriented towards quality.

Most of the world doesn’t care. They want it now.

Maybe the next service from Amazon will be ”predictive delivery” that uses AI to predict what I want to order and have it delivered to my doorstep before I had even thought of it!

It’s NOT a world — however hypothetical — that I want to live in. Not because I don’t want what I want, but because I don’t want to always have to move that fast!

Well, this post has wandered rather substantially from where it started, so I guess I’d best wind it down, before it gets too scattered!

Thanks for stopping by, and have a great weekend!

How about you? Are you good at picking just one thing and giving it 100%? Or do you prefer to have many alternatives to fall back on? Leave a comment if you feel so inclined — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!

(All text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is ORIGINAL CONTENT, created expressly for this platform — Not posted elsewhere!)

Created at 2025.04.05 00:40 PDT
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