What is risk to reward?
Opportunity cost is the real price of any choice: not what you pay, but the best alternative you give up by choosing it. Every yes is a hundred quiet nos — the hour spent in a pointless meeting is an hour of deep work that no refund can return.
Why it matters
Money costs are visible; opportunity costs are invisible, which is why people optimize the wrong one. Keeping a "safe" project alive costs the breakthrough project it's starving. A free event that eats your Saturday isn't free. Trained trade-off thinking is mostly just making the invisible column visible.
An example
A shop owner spends every Saturday doing his own bookkeeping to save the $200 an accountant would charge. His Saturdays could generate $600 in sales. The bookkeeping isn't saving $200 — it's costing $400 a week, invisibly.
How to practice it
Attach an "instead of what?" to your next three commitments before saying yes. Too Hard Pile's risk-to-reward drills train you to price the invisible column — trade-offs, asymmetries, and what the yes actually crowds out.
📖 Practice this model in a story — The Ticket
Reading about mental models doesn't build the reflex — reps do. Too Hard Pile schedules each drill back with spaced repetition so the model is there when a real decision needs it.