The non-linear

So many more seeds than we can imagine, leading to so many more seedlings than we can conceive of. (Image by Goran Horvat)

One of my pet peeves over the years has been the way adults fawn over talented children.

“If he’s this good at the piano at age eight, imagine how incredible he’ll be in ten years!”

First of all, I’d like to see us, as a culture, respect kids as human beings in the here and now. What about the accomplishments they’ve already made? And what can they contribute today? We don’t have to put pressure on them to live up to the future that we imagine for them.

And the second thing is that this is not how learning works. More time does not always yield more visible progress. We hit plateaus, we take breaks, we get burnt out and try other things.

Learning is not linear. A person, especially a young person, who is studying with focused intensity may accomplish in six months what the average person would accomplish in five years. But even the most talented people do not continuously maintain the type of significant growth. It levels off at a certain point.

It is hard for people to understand non-linear processes. That’s one of the things that made Covid so difficult to manage in the early days: Many of us underestimated the threat to public health represented by such a virus. The behavior and attitudes of many people were based on a linear understanding of growth, not an exponential one.

And then there’s the logarithmic growth that often happens in learning and other types of human development, which starts off fast and slows down as time goes by.

In our society, we are trained to believe that hard work pays off over time. Most entry-level jobs are paid by the hour, and we come to expect that that’s how money flows to us: Work an hour, get paid for an hour.

However, those who become wealthy understand leverage: They realize that their assets can grow exponentially. They can do one deal that makes them millions. They can license one product that sets them up for life.

To the rest of us, this might seem unfair or appear to be pure luck. But grasping non-linear progression is a shift in thinking that we can work toward.

I find that thinking this way does take practice. I keep slipping into linear expectations when I know that non-linear results are possible.

One example is the number of followers a creator has on TikTok. Follower growth is largely driven by increased visibility, and you never know when the algorithm is going to decide to show a given video to hundreds of thousands of people.

I keep forgetting this and thinking, “Okay, if it took me x days to get from 1,000 to 2,000 followers, it will take x days to get to 3,000 and 2x days to get to 4,000.” But that’s not true. It could take 60 days to get from 1,000 to 2,000 and a matter of hours to get from 2,000 to 10,000, or vice versa.

The whole exercise is pointless anyway because the number of followers I have doesn’t have much to do with my primary reason for being on the platform, which is to build relationships. But it’s additionally pointless because my math is fundamentally wrong.

Ironically, my resulting actions are linear, for the time being: Keep making and posting videos on more or less a daily basis. Our collective actions related to Covid were linear for a long time — for example, wearing masks in public places. Similarly, we might practice an instrument for a certain amount of time each day. If we want to build wealth exponentially through investments, we sock it away linearly, the same amount coming out of every paycheck. We just keep doing the same thing, regardless of the outcome.

The thing to keep in mind is that we’re not doing it wrong if our pace of progress slows down, and we’re not necessarily doing it right if we happen to hit the jackpot. We can be ready for a big upturn or a big downturn, understanding the mechanism behind it and sticking with our boring old plan before, during, and after.

Of course, if we do get impatient and frustrated, knowing that we could be seeing a massive return, we can continue to look out for those non-linear opportunities to come our way. This could mean a long period of investment that is designed to pay off later on, or a short bet that we can quickly capitalize on. We may find that risk increases along with the possibility of a significant windfall, and we ought to keep that in mind as we go.

And it’s worth mentioning that there are many ways to find leverage. Growing a team, automating tasks, and building a platform are all strategies we can use to get out of the linear cycle.

In my current circumstances, I’m going to keep inching along, but I’m also going to do things with no immediate payoff. Maybe I’ll spot an unusual opportunity to win a disproportionate benefit relative to a modest investment. I’m open to it, but I’m not banking on it. And if it happens, I’ll know that it has nothing to do with whether I deserve it or not.