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The choice of how you allocate your time to finding new things or taking advantage of things you’ve already discovered is part of the classic explore-exploit problem.[*] How much time should you spend exploring the landscape for new opportunities and how much of your time should you spend exploiting things that are already positive expected value? Exploitation in this sense doesn’t mean manipulating or doing something underhanded. It just means that you’re taking advantage of an opportunity that you already have. For a company that has an established product, resources devoted to continuing to market, produce, and sell that product are spent on exploiting something they have already discovered, like Blockbuster exploiting its profitable business model of renting and selling videos in physical stores. On the other hand, resources spent on research and development of new products or strategies are being devoted to exploration, the discovery of new products or business models the company might pursue. Because companies have limited resources, you can immediately see the importance of figuring out the explore-exploit balance. If they don’t get it right, exploring too little, they stop innovating, sticking with what used to work until they are out of business. Of course, the same is true in our personal lives, with how we allocate our resources of time, money, effort, and attention between exploring new opportunities and sticking with the ones we already have.
THE COMMUNIST SUCCESSES in the central sector were mounting. Three days into what had started as an American offensive, the Chinese were now moving in on two of the prizes they had sought from the start, Wonju and Chipyongni. As the Chinese seemed ready to take Wonju, fears for Chipyongni grew. So far almost everything the Americans had done in Wonju had gone wrong, and the Communist victories had seemed like a continuation of what had happened around the Chongchon. Then, with both Wonju and Chipyongni at stake, the Americans caught a major break, the kind that can turn defeat into victory. On the morning of February 14, a small artillery spotter plane was flying over the Som River, which cut its way through the mountains northwest of Wonju. One of the observers, Lieutenant Lee Hartell of the Fifteenth Field Artillery Battalion, happened to look out. There, along the sandy beach of the river, was an unusually heavy tree line, or so he thought at first, a lot more trees than one usually saw in that area. He decided to look again. This time he noticed that the tree line was moving. It was not a tree line, he suddenly understood, but a vast Chinese force, seemingly well camouflaged, and so confident that they were moving en masse in daylight as they almost never did, and did not even freeze as they were supposed to when a plane came over. With victory so close and time so precious, they now had too little respect for their enemies and had simply ignored the spotter plane. Hartell and his stunned pilot placed the force at as many as two divisions, perhaps fourteen thousand men moving four abreast, almost surely on their way to the final battle for Wonju. Hartell radioed in his find and called for artillery fire. The battle was soon to be memorialized by the Americans as the Wonju Shoot.
The Coldest Winter
David Halberstam
Based on his data, Bouchard estimates that between one in ten and one in twenty people start with elevated aerobic capacity—though not nearly as high as the naturally fit six—and between one in ten and one in fifty people are high aerobic responders. “The probability that a person will be highly endowed and highly trainable is the product of those two probabilities,” Bouchard says. “It’s not pretty. It’s between one in one hundred and one in one thousand.”
The Sports Gene
David Epstein
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