Nodira - 101 Ways to Stay Sane

y = a(1 + r)^t i used to open my talks and presentations with this formula. a is what you start with, r is how much you improve each step, t is how many steps you take. the point was simple. keep adding to the pile, knowledge, skills, experience, and because r sits on top of everything you already have, every next step is bigger than the last. give it enough t and the curve goes vertical. i still think the pile part is true. the curve part i'd now say differently. the other day i saw a Veritasium video on power laws, and in it they run a version of the formula as a casino game. you start with $1. flip a coin. heads, your money multiplies by 1.1. tails, by 0.9. you do this 100 times and keep whatever's left. since heads and tails are equally likely, the "expected" result is $1. you should end up on average right where you started. but the fun thing is, the median outcome is 61 cents. why. multiplication is not that fair. one heads and one tails should cancel out, but 1.1 x 0.9 = 0.99. so a perfectly balanced run, 50 heads and 50 tails, leaves you with less than you started. the only way to come out ahead is to get more heads than tails, and the only way to come out way ahead is a long streak of them. 100 heads in a row gives you almost $14,000, which is roughly a 1 in 10^30 event. quite an absurd number. so now look at the formula again. it assumes r is positive every single step. once you admit real life has negative-r days too, the maths changes. even with an even mix of good and bad days you end up slightly below where you started (and the vertical curve belongs to whoever happened to get the streak). so this is the shape of most things that compound. wealth, follower counts, book sales, startup returns. a venture firm Horsley Bridge backed 7,000 startups over 30 years. more than half lost money. the top 6% made 60% of all the profit. Y Combinator in 2012 traced 75% of its returns to 2 out of 280 companies. a power law in practice, right. a handful of outcomes so big they carry everything, and a long line of small ones behind them. the average looks great while the median is a loss. and this is where the "keep going" advice actually comes from, tho for a different reason than usually. in these systems, big outcomes don't have big causes. the video spends about 30 minutes on forest fires and sandpiles to make this one point lol. every forest fire starts the same way, one lightning strike. most burn a few trees. once in a while the same strike takes out half the park. the spark is identical, THE ONLY thing differs is the state of the forest around it. which means you can't look at a spark and know which one it is. same with your own actions. the guy who researched that video, Casper, was reading a book that said one idea could change your life. so under that line he wrote "send an email to Veritasium." he sent it. didn't hear anything for four weeks. then a reply offering him a freelance video. that email looked identical to every other email he'd sent that month. same grain of sand, different avalanche. so keep flipping. most of your tries will land at 0.9 and that's the normal outcome. the number of tries is the only part you actually control. what matters is that it keep you around long enough for one of your ordinary days to turn out to be the big one. @summernotes