On Risk

On the A's constantly updating their Moneyball strategy.  Note this:

“If you’re a small or mid-market team, you’re compelled to engage in a high-variance strategy. We don’t want to just run our operation the same way everyone else does, with the same blend of stats and scouting, In some sense, the optimal strategy is to take risks. We make trades that might be perceived as risky. Sometimes they pay off, like Josh Reddick. 

Sometimes we acquire guys it turns out we were wrong about. “If there isn’t some residual between how you evaluate players and how other teams evaluate them, then you’re just using industry values to put together the second-lowest payroll team in the league, and likely end up being the second-worst team. You kind of have to take those risks to outperform your payroll. Sometimes it’s going to backfire, just because you have to try to do something different. 

“If I was the Yankees, that wouldn’t be my strategy. All I’d have to do is be as good at scouting and analytics as everyone else, and my payroll gives me the advantage. If you don’t have that advantage, you have to do something else.

Pretty similar to playing the small stack in poker.  It's generally worth it to jump in on a 50/50 gambit to double your stack when you're small, but if you're in the lead, you want better odds to possibly let the opponent back into the game.  Then again, sometimes if I'm the big stack, I like to throw the pressure on the small stack guy if I sense they fear getting knocked out of the game.  Just depends on who you are playing.

I think this can apply to other things in life as well.  In my field, screenwriting, I generally think there are advantages to being non-professional (and talented) in that you can essentially write anything you want.  When you become professional, your time suddenly has value, and you often have collaborators, so you tend to write towards a specific audience with commercial concerns always hovering around.  You should always be writing for an audience in mind - even with a spec - but it's just you can pick and choose as small or large audience as you desire and should you fail, no one will know it.  Point being, a spec screenplay should be riskier than a commercially contracted screenplay.