The Red Car Theory: why you only find what you're already looking for

You cannot seize opportunities as a side hustle. It’s a full-time job.

Introduction

There are only a handful of concepts that keep visiting me again and again like an uninvited (but welcome) guest. The idea is simple enough: you notice what you pay attention to, and you miss what you don’t pay attention to. It goes like this: you’re asked how many red cars you noticed on your way to work. At best you’ll answer 1 or 2, but most likely it’s none at all. If I ask you to deliberately pay attention to all the red cars on your way to work, and later ask you how many you noticed, the number is much larger. And if I ask you then how many blue cars did you notice, the answer again is probably none, unless you predicted this question or got excited about counting cars in general.

What’s the big deal?

A lot of us are waiting for good things to happen to us. We’re putting in effort across the board in many areas of life, are generally optimistic, and think that one day we’ll get a break, a windfall, or something wonderful comes our way. We think “oh when the opportunity arises I’ll surely be taking it”. It’s a cozy place to be at, but it’s wrong. Birds rarely fly into the cat’s mouth.

The big deal about The Red Car Theory is that you will notice the lucky breaks you’ve been wishing for only if you’ve deliberately kept an eye out for them. They won’t come if you’re not paying attention. You cannot seize opportunities as a side hustle. It’s a full-time job. It means that you’ll only get lucky in the thing that you’re actually putting in outsized focus, effort, and energy.

You’re not going to spot red cars by scanning for blue ones. And you’re not going to spot them from inside your house either. You have to be on the road, looking.

Why splitting focus costs more than its fair share

I’ll start with a caveat that there are relatively few people able to just quit their job and start a business for even a few months. So sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do and do the thing anyway. I respect that deeply.

The 60:40 trap

Recently, I’ve had my own such predicament. I was working in a wonderful startup as a growth engineer, and my initial idea was to do a lot of heavy lifting first on the weekends for my own business. And then I even thought what if I were given the opportunity to work only 60:40, or any such share. If not there, then elsewhere. The idea seems great: enough of a salary to be able to keep going indefinitely while building the business income.

But this is extremely taxing for the psyche. You respect your employer so you’re giving your all on the days you’re working for them. Then you context switch to your own thing. You do some work, but still have the day job’s issues on your mind. This tires you, you need more breaks, and you don’t get a lot done. Then comes the day job days again. And at the day job, you’re not super happy because you know that you aren’t working on the most important thing in your life right now. So the work itself is less motivating, and you get exhausted quicker as a result.

Fully immersed

Contrast that to building a business every day. You wake up, knowing what is important today, as you were just doing it yesterday. When you’re doing the work, because this is the only mentally taxing thing you do, it doesn’t need any context switching and as such can go for longer hours. When you go out in the evening or on walks, you’ll have insights because your brain is still mostly in the context of your business. When you go to bed, you fall asleep half-thinking, half-dreaming about your most important work. You wake up, rinse, and repeat.

This is much more powerful than the 60:40 could ever be, as both the 60% part and the 40% part is taxed heavily by the other side. Not to mention all the topics around humans not actually being able to multitask. But of course, being this focused about just one thing, also means the work has to be important enough for you. It has to be meaningful, or else you’ll dread waking up, because a lot of people, me included, need plenty of novelty in life. Business, fortunately, has a lot of variety in its day-to-day operations. Just that the intensity is dialed up quite a bit compared to the alternatives, so you’ve got to be able to handle the speed.

It’s not for everyone (but if it is, act like it)

Not everyone wants to do extraordinary things. Some people just enjoy life as it is, with its red, blue, and black cars, however they come, and smelling the roses on the way, forgetting about anything that happened yesterday.

When you are in the game, you actually notice the opportunities that come to you. When you’re only dabbling in it, with one leg in, one leg out, you won’t catch them in time. You’ll be counting blue cars and wondering why you never see red ones.

However, I think it’s a tragedy when someone’s actually ambitious, or has big dreams in a specific field, and then just waits around because the opportunity hasn’t arrived yet. You create the opportunities.