Wednesday, January 18, 2012

The "What If?" Moment

Have you ever thought of the "What if's" in life? What if I had studied for my test instead of going to the movies? Would I have gotten a better grade? These "What if" moments are the opportunity cost of your choices. I have decided that I want to go into graphic design as my major and the major influence of this was taking the yearbook course at school. What if I hadn't taken yearbook? Would I still want to go into graphic design? This was my first thought when learning about opportunity cost.

In middle school, I had always taken choir and had decided that I was also going to take choir in high school, but one day I decided to look at my choices and I realized that I wanted to try out yearbook. At that point in time, choir was my opportunity cost. I had no clue if I was going to like yearbook and I was constantly wondering if I made the right decision, but that is the whole point of choices. Choosing which is the best option at the time is a big part in economics. When people are trying to decide what to produce, they are choosing to take one idea over another. What if their opportunity cost would have made them millions of dollars? This is the whole point of choices, you won't know if you made the right decision until you put your all into the choice you made to make it work.

2 comments:

Smith said...

Opportunity cost is (to me) the scariest part of life because you don’t know if it will work out or not. As you said, unless you give your all you will never know the cost benefits of your decisions.

Erin said...

It seems to me that all the "what ifs" we consider in our life occur because we had missed out on a particular opportunity. What makes people really choose the best option for them? People don't know what their opportunity cost will be until they make a decision. If we put our all into the decisions we make then perhaps the opportunity cost will be in our favor. All of our decisions come with a potential loss, but we should not be scared to make important decisions because like you said, "you won't know if you made the right decision until you put your all into the choice you made."