How Serious Are You?

The Spectrum of SeriousnessIn the context of achieving a goal, one end of the seriousness spectrum is complete unseriousness, where the player doesn’t do anything to further their goal. On the other end is obsessiveness, where the player does the bare minimum in other parts of their life to maximize progress towards their goal—they may lose friends, suffer health issues, or enter financial straits in their pursuit of glory and greatness.But actual seriousness (AS) and claimed seriousness (CS) can be, and often are, two very different points on the spectrum. Economists call AS a revealed preference and CS a stated preference. I’ll call them AS and CS because it feels like a subset of preference theory. It also makes it sound like I came up with something original.I suspect CS follows a normal distribution and AS follows a skewed-right distribution, i.e., the bulk of people have below-average AS. Put simply, most people are not as serious towards their goals as they claim. There are a…