The Quid Pro Quo Illusion

What if the worst trade you ever made… is one you don’t even remember making?

There are many ways to live a bad life – chasing the wrong goals, ignoring your intuition, staying in comfort zones. But one of the worst can be summed up in three words: Quid. Pro. Quo.

It looks smart in the short term.

You give something, you get something.

Clean. Calculated. Efficient.

But what you lose in that transaction often slips past unnoticed:

• a potential relationship
• a ripple of long-term value
• an opportunity to build trust that compounds quietly over time

And here’s the paradox: what you lose is not even in your frame of awareness.

It’s an unknown unknown.

You don’t know what you missed. And worse – you don’t even realise you missed something.

Focusing only on immediate gain might feel like rational behaviour.

But the truly rational choice is adding value, investing in people, and thinking in decades, not days.

It’s just that this kind of math doesn’t fit into simple equations.

But those who get it, play a different game and they tend to win big, silently.