to strike while the iron is hot

Getting older has its advantages, at least for those myopic people like me. When my headache got worse with the new glasses, I started to doubt whether the new glasses were all right for me and went to consult another optician. To my great surprise, I was told by the optometrician, after a whole procedure of measuring, that my vision has actually improved rather than deteriorated. ’It is a normal phenomenon that your vision can improve when you grow older.’, the grey-haired optometrician said that to me gently, as if the words ‘grow older’  would hurt me.

With hindsight, I should have waited with my previous decision to purchase the new pair of glasses with much higher power. But at that time I was so happy to discover the cause for my headache that I completely forgot to apply my usual ‘real-options’ way of thinking. As I wrote in my previous blog, decisions like purchasing new glasses are certainly not  ’now or never’, have sunk costs, and have uncertain outcomes–a textbook example of real options.

But I was in a very different mindset at the time when I visited the first optician. It was the day that I received the e-mail from Brian, who read my blog and shared with me his new thought on real options:  There are lots of decisions in life that are ‘now or never’, i.e., for which the option of waiting is not real. Such as the decision to learn to ski…if you keep postponing it, someday you will be too old to do that. The same can apply in business- the niche market is there but if you are not the first to jump in, the opportunity will be lost. 

“It is of course silly to have regrets about what might have been”, wrote Brian, ”But the young should be aware of the maxim to ‘strike while the iron is hot’ “.

Well, I guess I must have taken the maxim a bit too far and struck the wrong iron…