Blog

Growth by Learning: Does Progress Accelerate with Mastery?

Posted inRandom6 Comments on Growth by Learning: Does Progress Accelerate with Mastery?

Scott Young wrote a good post about two types of progress when learning something new: logarithmic and exponential.

Anything you try to improve will have a growth curve. Imagine you ran everyday and you tracked your speed to finish a 5-mile course. Smoothing out the noise, over enough time you’d probably get a graph like this:

Logarithmic Curve

Here, improvement works on a logarithmic scale. As you get better, it gets harder and harder to improve. Elite athletes expend enormous effort to shave seconds off their best times. Novice athletes can shave minutes with just a little practice.

Logarithmic growth is the first type of growth. This is where you see a lot of progress in the beginning, but continuing progress is more difficult.

Now imagine a different graph. This time you’ve build a new website you update regularly and you’re measuring subscribers. This graph would likely look very different:

This is exponential growth, the second type of growth. Website traffic is often exponential because as a blog attracts more readers, there are more opportunities for word about the blog to spread. A blog with zero traffic also has zero word of mouth.

I’ve noticed most things tend to be either logarithmic or exponential growth. Despite this, linear progress is what most people expect. We tend to expect things to move in the same direction or rate as they have in the past. This violation of our expectation leads to some mistakes in how we set goals and act on them.

 Scott later offers advice on how to tell whether a given activity is one or the other:

The easiest way to tell is to look at how other people have progressed in that field. Don’t pay attention to their rates, just pay attention to the shape of their growth trajectory. Is it the kind that slows down with mastery or speeds up?

I’ve written about related themes in the past. Here’s my post about efforts where you see continuous, ongoing improvement vs. quantum leaps. Here’s my post about how formal schooling is an information rich environment where you receive constant feedback on how you’re doing, whereas in the real world you sometimes have to go months without knowing if you’re on the right track.

Book Short: Republic, Lost

Posted inBooksLeave a comment on Book Short: Republic, Lost

Larry Lessig’s latest — Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress, and a Plan to Stop It — is an excellent overview of how money and campaign finance cripples D.C. lawmakers.

At a time when everyone seems to have a different pet policy issue that’s “urgent” and “critical” to our country’s future, it’s refreshing read something that contemplates deeper, underlying issues that, if addressed, could have a positive trickle down effect on the entire system.

Lessig’s writing in general is, as they say, self-recommending.

“What Would I Need to Believe For This to Be the Right Decision?”

Posted inBusiness5 Comments on “What Would I Need to Believe For This to Be the Right Decision?”

Long time readers know I love easy-to-remember questions, litmus tests, proxies, rules of thumb that make navigating a complex and uncertain world a little bit easier.

Dan Shapero, a VP at LinkedIn, wrote a good post recently about a way to bring clarity to a decision making process.

If you’re faced with a choice of whether or not to do something, just ask yourself, “What would I need to believe for this to be the right decision?” This simple question is incredibly clarifying.

Here’s an example: I’m trying to decide whether or not to prioritize the development of a new product. In order for that to be a great idea, I would need to believe the following assertions:

1. We have the team capable of building the product

2. Customers will buy the product at an attractive price if we build it

3. We have the distribution to reach potential customers at a reasonable cost

4. None of our competitors can replicate this offering in the next 12 months

5. There are no higher priority development opportunities for the R&D team

Simple and powerful.

One Year Anniversary Slideshare: Start-Up of You Executive Summary

Posted inStart-Up of You2 Comments on One Year Anniversary Slideshare: Start-Up of You Executive Summary

A year ago, we launched The Start-Up of You. To celebrate the anniversary, we put together a 190 slide deck on Slideshare summarizing the key themes. It’s beautiful, with vivid images accompanying text. In just over 24 hours, it’s been viewed more than 100,000 times.


(Thanks to Ian Alas for his work on this.)

Book Review: The Best American Essays of 2012

Posted inBooks1 Comment on Book Review: The Best American Essays of 2012

This year’s edition is curated by David Brooks, and as usual, it’s phenomenal. One of the things I most look forward to in my annual reading diet is diving into the latest Best American Essays series.

Brooks must have death on his mind as several essays in the anthology are directly or indirectly on the topic.

There’s Miah Arnold’s piece on teaching English classes to some of the sickest children in the world in Houston. Imagine teaching a class where your child-aged students are dying every day, every week–you grow attached to your students but before the semester’s over, they’re dead. “When you know somebody with less than six months to live and that person agrees to spend any moment of it with you, the immensity of that generosity does change you, undeniably.”

There’s Dudley Clendin’s short piece titled “The Good Short Life,” about living (and dying) of A.L.S. It’s very moving. There’s this serious point:

We obsess in this country about how to eat and dress and drink, about finding a job and a mate. About having sex and children. About how to live. But we don’t talk about how to die. We act as if facing death weren’t one of life’s greatest, most absorbing thrills and challenges. Believe me, it is. This is not dull. But we have to be able to see doctors and machines, medical and insurance systems, family and friends and religions as informative — not governing — in order to be free.

And after describing why he’d rather die than be an (expensive) vegetable:

Last month, an old friend brought me a recording of the greatest concert he’d ever heard, Leonard Cohen, live, in London, three years ago. It’s powerful, haunting music, by a poet, composer and singer whose life has been as tough and sinewy and loving as an old tree.

The song that transfixed me, words and music, was “Dance Me to the End of Love.” That’s the way I feel about this time. I’m dancing, spinning around, happy in the last rhythms of the life I love. When the music stops — when I can’t tie my bow tie, tell a funny story, walk my dog, talk with Whitney, kiss someone special, or tap out lines like this — I’ll know that Life is over.

#

Here are my excerpts from the 2001 edition. From the 2007 edition. Thanks to Amy Batchelor for her on-going inspiration to read this series.