Three Mantras For a Power Law Life
As we’ve talked about before, Power Laws are counterintuitive, critical, and slippery to keep top of mind.
So, I have some mental tricks to keep these ideas top of mind. Mantras that I use as reminders of how to think, prioritize, and act in order to align with an elusive reality.
Maybe they will serve you too.
#1 "Claw up the power law"
I repeat this to myself over and over as I write my books.
A surprising truth about creative projects is, roughly speaking:
The top 10% earns more than the bottom 99%
The top 1% earns more than the bottom 90%
The top 0.1% earns more than the bottom 50%
Which means the benefits for the incremental effort to go from 10% to 1% isn’t 10% more, it’s 10x more.
This is difficult to grok until you’ve experienced it first-hand. I’ve experienced it and I still have to remind myself this is how the world works.
That incremental effort can feel so unreasonable. Sometimes they are microscopic adjustments. A fifteenth re-read. The twentieth alpha reader interview. Hiring the third editor.
As long as I feel like the product is still improving, I’ll keep working on it, because I know going from top 0.1% to top 0.01% is the difference between selling 1 million copies and 10 million copies.
#2 "The asymmetry is behind you"
A friend said this as a five-word response to my five-paragraph problem, and it hit me like a beam of light from god himself.
What a useful lens for understanding opportunities: “Are you before or after the big asymmetry?”
There are many good lives lived on steady lines and the magic of compounding. But if you’re playing a power law game, some parts of the curve are ~all of the gains, and other parts are flat, for years..
Maybe a better question is “is there an asymmetry immediately ahead?”
The best businesses (or careers, or lives) are a series of S-curves.
(See “S-Curves for Forecasting” on LessWrong and Eugene Wei’s amazing post on this, Invisible Asymptotes)
It takes situational awareness to know whether you’re nearing an exponential shift or living in the flatland forever. And it takes courage to make a change when you feel like you’ve got with no curve ahead.
#3: "Your next thing should dwarf everything else you've ever done"
Something to consider when starting new projects, new jobs, new relationships, or new companies. It can be tempting to keep repeating what works, or chase only incremental improvements.
I loved this quote from Sam Altman’s “How to Be Successful”:
It’s useful to focus on adding another zero to whatever you define as your success metric—money, status, impact on the world, or whatever.
I am willing to take as much time as needed between projects to find my next thing.
But I always want it to be a project that, if successful, will make the rest of my career look like a footnote.
When you see career trajectories that boggle the mind, it's usually because they are stacking 10Xs while others are stacking 10%s.