Set your criteria for what matters before opportunities arrive, or you'll default to whatever's urgent. A person who spent twenty years climbing one career ladder may later regret it, trapped by identity and reputation.
If you've never set the criterion around which you're going to evaluate each opportunity as it presents yourself, then you're left with what's immediately available. And what's most immediately available is usually the urgent, and the other area sometimes takes a little longer with people are afraid to say that this is what they want or that they've made a mistake. Especially in economics. You talk about opportunity costs and sunk cost fallacy. Imagine if you spent 20 years rising through the ranks of a profession and now you decide you want to do something totally different for folks at the highest levels. But really, at almost every stage, somebody thinks, this is what I'm known for, this is who I am.
