When everyone’s rushing toward one opportunity, check the one they all walked past.

Crowds make things expensive. When everybody applies to the same programme, tries out for the same position or wants the same shift, the competition is brutal and the prize may not even be the best thing available. Meanwhile the option nobody fancies is uncontested, which might mean it is poor and might mean it is merely unfashionable. The crowd generally did not check.

Spend ten minutes on whatever the people around you walked past. Ask one person who took the unpopular route how it went. If it is genuinely worse, you lost ten minutes and learned why.