INVESTING EFFORT
Let us start with an analogy, for clarity. If you want to put some money aside for a long-range benefit, i.e. if you want to invest some money, you need to keep make sure you have enough money to sustain yourself and achieve other valuable goals even after the investment. If this is not true, then the investment becomes an unbearable or unworthy cost, because you would be giving up something more important (i.e. your ability to live and pursue values) for the sake of something less important (i.e. a long-term benefit).
Now, money has the following properties:
The above also apply for energy, specifically one’s own volitional energy to achieve one’s own values. By volitional energy, I mean the ability to apply one’s volition toward one’s goals. At any given point, like any resource, it is finite in quantity. It can be created or renewed, but only over time and with the right causes (e.g. rest, recovery, experience of concrete of value, etc.). Finally, pretension of quantity (e.g. pretending you have more energy than you do) lessens its quantity by draining it and preventing you from acting so as to recover and regain it.
Thus, putting volitional energy toward a long-term goal is essentially investing energy, since you are not necessarily going to get the concrete value of your action for a while. Since the existence and experience of concrete value is key to sustaining and fuelling motivation and thereby key to sustaining and fuelling volitional energy, you cannot invest such energy unless you have enough or regain enough after the investment to pursue your other values in life. The reasoning follows the same pattern as the investment of money: the investment becomes an unbearable or unworthy cost, because you would be giving up something more important (i.e. you ability to live and pursue values) for the sake of something less important (i.e. a long-term benefit).
Let us concretise this. Consider the goal of learning to improve your professional opportunities, without a specific opportunity in mind. In other words, such learning is valuable, but its concrete value can only be realised in the long-term, and is not tied to a concrete or more easily concretisable goal (e.g. training for a specific work or skill-set). Now, evidently, it cannot be the most essential pursuit in your life, because (1) it cannot fuel your efforts on its own, and (2) a range of more concrete goals need to be achieved to make the value of this long-term goal realisable, e.g. researching and seeking specific opportunities, gaining professional experience and connections, maintaining your health and fitness (mental, physical and psychological), etc. In particular, if you expend so much energy that you have none left for (1), you will be drained of motivation very soon, and for (2), you will fail to achieve the preconditions for the success of your long-term goal. Hence, investment without thought would actually make the investment not empowering but debilitating, i.e. an anti-value rather than a value.
Here are some other examples: