1. Be born to the right parents, in the right circumstances (not helpful, but important to acknowledge).
2. Apply yourself strategically in areas that compound (e.g. knowledge and skills, saving and investing, resistance training, networking).
3. Apply your effort wherever the yield is highest. All of these domains follow an S-shaped curve, with early exponential growth running into an upper ceiling of diminishing returns. At any given point in time, it might make sense to focus primarily on accumulating money, at another, skills and knowledge, at another, health and fitness, etc.
4. Choose goals that are complementary, so that each ‘bucket’ also helps to fill the others, and there’s no single point of failure (or at the very least, avoid goals which conflict with one another).
5. Keep doing 2-4 forever. Even if you never hit that knee-shaped curve, a consistent and cumulative effort over time is pretty powerful in and of itself.
After analysing the cases when I was in up and down momentum, I concluded that there are other additional points:
1.A new activity has initially up momentum, as it creates new connections, people are interested in your new project and you are inspired. An old activity creates down momentum, even if the quality of the product has improved, as people become bored with it. (There are counterexamples, e.g. Sequences).
2. You may learn to “feel” which action has up momentum or down momentum and navigate accordingly.
As far as I can tell:
1. Be born to the right parents, in the right circumstances (not helpful, but important to acknowledge).
2. Apply yourself strategically in areas that compound (e.g. knowledge and skills, saving and investing, resistance training, networking).
3. Apply your effort wherever the yield is highest. All of these domains follow an S-shaped curve, with early exponential growth running into an upper ceiling of diminishing returns. At any given point in time, it might make sense to focus primarily on accumulating money, at another, skills and knowledge, at another, health and fitness, etc.
4. Choose goals that are complementary, so that each ‘bucket’ also helps to fill the others, and there’s no single point of failure (or at the very least, avoid goals which conflict with one another).
5. Keep doing 2-4 forever. Even if you never hit that knee-shaped curve, a consistent and cumulative effort over time is pretty powerful in and of itself.
After analysing the cases when I was in up and down momentum, I concluded that there are other additional points:
1.A new activity has initially up momentum, as it creates new connections, people are interested in your new project and you are inspired. An old activity creates down momentum, even if the quality of the product has improved, as people become bored with it. (There are counterexamples, e.g. Sequences).
2. You may learn to “feel” which action has up momentum or down momentum and navigate accordingly.