# Invisible asymptotes  ## Metadata - Author: [[Remains of the Day]] - Full Title: Invisible asymptotes - Category: #articles - Document Tags: [[startups]] - URL: https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2018/5/21/invisible-asymptotes ## Highlights - People didn't care about this rational math. People, in general, are terrible at valuing their time, perhaps because for most people monetary compensation for one's time is so detached from the event of spending one's time. Most time we spend isn't like deliberate practice, with immediate feedback. Wealthy people tend to receive a much more direct and immediate payoff for their time which is why they tend to be better about valuing it. This is why the first thing that most ultra-wealthy people I know do upon becoming ultra-wealthy is to hire a driver and start to fly private. For most normal people, the opportunity cost of their time is far more difficult to ascertain moment to moment ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hhkncskegwg1j3hh65jn2cpq)) - Jeff counseled the same "fix it later" strategy in the early days when we didn't have good returns tracking. For a window of time in the early days of Amazon, if you shipped us a box of books for returns, we couldn't easily tell if you'd purchase them at Amazon and so we'd credit you for them, no questions asked. One woman took advantage of this loophole and shipped us boxes and boxes of books. Given our limited software resources, Jeff said to just ignore the lady and build a way to solve for that later. It was really painful, though, so eventually customer service representatives all shared, amongst themselves, the woman's name so they could look out for it in return requests even before such systems were built. Like a mugshot pinned to every monitor saying "Beware this customer." A tip of the hat to you, maam, wherever you are, for your enterprising spirit in exploiting that loophole ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hhkngs0bptdxmcfyekvxay0s))