The Cost-Skew from Inspiration
Motivation is powerful fuel, but it comes with a hidden distortion: it bends your sense of financial prudence. When inspiration hits, tools feel essential, conferences feel cheap, and business bets feel obvious. I call this the cost-skew from inspiration—the way ambition shifts what looks “reasonable” to spend.
Tools & Learning
I first noticed this back in the Army. Whenever I got into a motivated headspace—whether it was real estate investing, side hustles, or skill-building—I’d start rationalizing purchases. A new course. A better tool. Another book. Each one felt critical, because when you’re lit up, everything looks like acceleration.
But money was tight. I couldn’t actually buy all the leverage I thought I needed. That constraint ended up shaping my trajectory: I built my own solutions. In 2011, I taught myself HTML, CSS, and some JavaScript because outsourcing was too expensive. The skew drove me toward self-reliance. That tension—wanting every edge, but not being able to afford them—was the seed of my engineering path.
Fast-forward to today, with more financial freedom, and the skew shows up differently. Instead of being forced into DIY, it’s easier to overbuy: multiple SaaS subscriptions, extra courses, tools that don’t really pay back. The distortion is the same—it just plays out at a different scale.
Conferences & Experiences
The skew is especially vivid with conferences. One of my earliest big splurges was AWS re:Invent. The ticket and travel ran about $1,500. At the time, I only had $10–12k total. From the outside, it looked reckless. From the inside, it felt like the only move—my gift to myself, my way of stepping closer to the field I wanted to master.
I’ve learned you can’t necessarily predict which conferences will stick. Some leave almost nothing behind. Others plant seeds that grow for years. A researcher you saw once becomes a fixture in your feed. A company you barely noticed turns out to define a whole sector. (This is the entire idea behind talktop.us --- to give you an idea if an event will be worth your time and money.)
That’s the real function of conferences: they manufacture mindshare. They make certain people and ideas “sticky” in your attention, in ways webinars never do. Even if you never talk to them, they become part of your mental landscape — almost like personal micro-celebrities. And that creates the raw material for intentional networking later.
### A Challenge
It's easy to get yourself to think that since people interested in my product or service will be at this conference that you can justify the expense as marketing. Don't fool yourself. Spending hundreds or thousands of dollars to give and some business cards and t-shirts is ridiculous... thats a side benefit. You could do the same thing at universities, local free/cheap events, etc. The flights, hotels, and conference tickets are not biz-dev... its a vacation. So how do you disambigute whether or not you are making the right decision? Here is the litmus test:
Would I still go if there was no side benefit?
If the answer is yes — if I’d still pay just to be there, even without the veneer of “marketing” or “business development” — then I know what’s really driving me. It isn’t ROI in the narrow sense. It’s identity, resonance, trajectory.
That doesn’t make the spend any less skewed — it’s still a few hundred to a few thousand dollars gone that could be deployed elsewhere But at least I can see it clearly. I’m not fooling myself about handing out merch and promo materials. I’m choosing to pay for proximity to the people and ideas that matter most to me.
Marketing & Ventures
The same distortion shows up in ventures and business spending. When I’m inspired about an idea, it’s easy to justify ads, tools, or experiments before the return is proven. The T-shirt business is a perfect example: a $2,000 ad spend and a $2,000 conference ticket look interchangeable when I’m fired up. In reality, one is a direct marketing bet, the other is a personal/professional investment. But in the skewed headspace of inspiration, both feel equally obvious, equally necessary.
That blur—between personal momentum and business justification—is where a lot of founders and builders burn cash. And I’ve felt that pull many times.
Closing Reflection
The cost-skew from inspiration isn’t limited to any one category. It shows up in learning, in conferences, in ventures. The common thread is that when you’re inspired, costs stop looking like tradeoffs and start looking like fuel. Sometimes that’s dangerous. Sometimes it pushes you to stretch beyond reason. And sometimes, paradoxically, it leads to exactly the leap you needed to take.
The key isn’t to eliminate the skew. It’s to name it, to recognize the distortion. Because once you can see it, you can at least decide—am I rationalizing, or am I choosing to pay for the identity, the room, the momentum that really matters?