Unconventional Path Of Progress

I used to be part of the camp of people who calculate effort like they're buying groceries.

Say if I wanted to write a 10,000-word essay, I'd calculate that at 500 words an hour, it would take me 20 hours. I'd then spread those 20 hours linearly across four days, expecting a finished, polished piece.

The energy required to break free from where you are isn't proportional to where you're going, despite your ingrained mental models that prefer certain predictable growth.

I think a probable cause for such is because we're thinking in straight lines while the universe operates in curves.

"Operates in curves" here means that progress is observed through cyclical periods of stagnation and sudden breakthroughs. Both of which are influenced by unseen forces and compounding effects.

Getting an Asymmetrical Result Once

This shift in perspective usually comes about once you've experienced something that defies the expected input-output ratio.

A conversation that shifts your entire worldview could be a five-minute exchange with a stranger that unravels assumptions you've carried for decades, while years of formal education barely moved the needle on how you actually see things.

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You start to recognize that the most significant returns rarely announce themselves and always masquerade as ordinary moments until you look back and realize that Friday afternoon changed everything.

Momentum and Details

The accumulated weight of small consistencies that most people dismiss as insignificant is the picture-perfect definition of momentum.

Like that single cell getting really good at the basics, over and over and over, until the basics became something else entirely.

A relentless, quiet work on minute details seems trivial in isolation.

What's counterintuitive is that this same relentless attention to minutiae appears wasteful to outside observers.

But in aggregate, these details create an unstoppable inertia, pushing you through barriers that grand efforts fail to breach.

Details and Volume

The paradox here is that most details don't matter, but the ones that do matter enormously.

Sometimes, gathering more information can be interpreted as developing the pattern recognition to distinguish signal from noise when you're drowning in both.

Raw volume is just a huge pile of junk unless you've come up with a way to filter for the specific lever that unlocks disproportionate impact.

I think somewhere along the way, looking for leverage has been misunderstood and turned into a search for shortcuts without any understanding of compounding forces.

Without this discernment, more data simply means more confusion.

Cultivating an almost intuitive sense of what genuinely matters versus what is merely distracting static isn't a skill for the faint of heart or the impatient.

It only comes about through prolonged exposure to both signal and noise until you can feel the difference.

Less Measurable Spaces

Our ingrained linear thinking, probably compounded through industrial models of production will always fail us when applied to any domain where breakthrough moments cluster unpredictably rather than arriving on schedule.

There's definitely a route for significant advancement through brute force or following a prescribed path.

We can study the playbooks, copy successful models, execute proven strategies. This works, particularly in established domains with clear benchmarks and predictable competitive landscapes.

What tends to get missed in my view is that such a route is more of an effect, in terms of what becomes visible after the real work has already been done in less measurable spaces.

True progress more often than not emerges from the cumulative effect of underestimated effort on underestimated details leading to a perceived sudden asymmetrical result.

Say I watched a movie and got amazed by a particular scene that felt effortlessly perfect. That's just one layer, albeit the top one which was designed to feel seamless and inevitable.

Another layer, perceived mostly by people who've attempted similar work, is the hundreds of iterations, failed takes, and seemingly unrelated experiences that crystallized into those few minutes of screen time.

Most of the work that lead to any significant result happens in the unseen spaces.

For me, this means I need to put more focus on developing a tolerance for apparent inefficiency while building toward something that can't be measured yet.

And this comes from a backdrop of recognizing that in an economy that's getting built on exponential technologies and network effects, the old industrial model of predictable input-output relationships doesn't really apply any more.


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