Compounding effort

A tiny improvement you do today that you are able to sustain continuously over a long period of time will have an effect so big in size that it will be hard to recognize it started so small.

Writing is one of those things I’m trying to compound. Each post you read here in five minutes took me, on average, two hours to write. It really is hard for me but the potential benefits of being able to share ideas in an easy to digest way are very well worth it even if I need to do this for ten years until I am able to see results.

I know the effect is real and that it works.

Twenty years ago it was my interest in science and computers, ten years ago it was telephony, and ten years from now I’m still not sure but I’m working on it. I’m probably not going to become a writer but writing is a tool I will need for sure so here I am trying to make it work.

If you are unsure about that thing you did ten years ago that put you where you are today, be that in a good place or otherwise, I recommend you give a read to a book called Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell. It’s a great book that helped me find an explanation about why some things happen the way they do.

The idea of making these tiny efforts today is to put yourself in the position to be lucky in the future. We can’t predict it but we have a fair level of control over how prepared we are going to arrive at it. That’s the single biggest reason to do the effort today.

We may fail at the end, but it won’t be for lack of trying.