Munger talked about a handful of superpowers. Incentives was one. Opportunity cost was the other.

Incentives get all the attention. Easy to see why. Show me the comp plan, I'll show you the behavior. It clicks fast. You can watch it work in real time.

Opportunity cost took me longer. I knew the definition for years. Could explain it at dinner. But I hadn't made a single better decision because of it until I started looking at where my time and my team's energy were actually going.

I stopped asking "is this worth doing?" and started asking a different question:

Compared to what?

Is this the best use of this resource right now, compared to every other option we have?

Take what I see happening across the industry right now. There is a rush to AI everything. Everybody wants to pilot something. New software, new tools, new platforms. And in a lot of cases, the real problems are not being addressed. Companies are layering AI onto a leasing team that can't follow up within 24 hours, a maintenance operation that loses work orders, incentive structures that reward occupancy and ignore retention, and a business model that was bleeding cash before the pilot started.

Meanwhile, your team is pulled off the work that actually moves the business. They are not following up with clients or closing sales. They are testing a new tool that might save fifteen minutes on a task instead!

Nobody calculates that cost. It never shows up on the P&L, but it compounds every quarter you let it run.

One bad priority does not just cost you that priority's resources. It costs you the compounding gains those resources would have produced in their best use. That gap between good allocation and lazy allocation looks small in year one. By year five it is enormous. That is why Munger called it a superpower. The edge compounds.

If you have five or six objectives running at the same time, you are not focusing. You are diluting your ability to execute on any of them. Identify the number one constraint in your business. Fix that. Then move to the next one.

That extra business line you launched. That mediocre deal you funded. That low-value meeting you keep attending. That problem employee you keep rationalizing. That side project with no edge. That AI pilot nobody asked "compared to what?" about.

Each one takes a bite out of capital, attention, and momentum. People see the direct cost. They almost never calculate what those resources could have produced somewhere else. The graveyard of missed opportunities stays buried where nobody looks.

Saying no gets all the credit. But no is just the output. The input is asking "compared to what?" often enough that the answer becomes obvious.

Munger was not trying to be busy. He was trying to be right, which meant ignoring almost everything and doing it better than anyone else in the room.

I didn't understand that until I stopped looking at what things cost and started looking at what they replaced.