Why Progress Often Frustrates Us (And What To Do About It)
Few things have the ability to confound and frustrate us like how progress happens. This is mostly because progress often takes a trajectory similar to something else we also find very difficult to wrap our heads around:
Exponential growth.
Progress, almost as a rule, never happens linearly, it mostly follows an exponential growth curve where initially, it happens too slowly and too small to notice, and then when compounding is allowed to do its magic, things happens so fast and so big in way that completely beats our imagination.
The thing is, we find linear thinking much more easier to wrap our heads around than exponential thinking. We intuitively get how 5+5+5+5+5+5+5+5 becomes 40, but we get stumbled that the same number of 5’s multiplied together is big as 390,625. We get confused by exponential growth which often makes us under-appreciate how powerful it is. We therefore miss a crucial understanding of how big things become big.
As physicist Albert Bartlett puts it:
We don’t intuitively think exponentially, so we get caught out when something grows exponentially, and that is regardless of how much we are warned that that’s how it works. Here’s an illustration.
There’s an old Persian legend about an inventor who presented a beautiful chessboard to his king. The king was so impressed and offered to grant the man one wish. The clever inventor made a simple wish: He requested that the king give him 1 grain of rice for the first square on the board, 2 grains for the second square, 4 grains for the third, 8 grains for the fourth, and so on.
Sounding like an modest proposal, the king agreed and ordered rice to be brought from his store. The fourth square of the chessboard required 8 grains, the tenth square took 512 grains, the fifteenth square required 16,384, and the twenty-first square required more than a million grains of rice. By the fortieth square more than a trillion grain of rice was needed. And there was simply not enough rice in the world to reach the sixty-fourth and final square. So naturally, the king’s entire rice supply was exhausted. Unamused, the king had the inventor beheaded.
While this story is obviously what it is — a legend — , it demonstrates the power of exponential growth and our struggle to comprehend it. We find it very deceptive when something is growing exponentially because it goes through long stretch when it seems nothing much is happening then suddenly things become big, very big, very quickly.
Here’s a French riddle that further confirms our struggle with exponential growth:
Suppose you own a pond on which a water lily is growing. The lily plant doubles in size each day. If the lily were allowed to grow unchecked, it would completely cover the pond in 30 days, choking off the other forms of life in the water. For a long time the lily plant seems small, and so you decide not to worry about cutting it back until it covers half the pond. On what day will that be?
On the twenty-ninth day, of course. Then you’ll have only one day to save your pond!
Exponential growth is really not intuitive.
Understanding exponential growth — how big things get big — is crucial because most progress and improvement follows an exponential growth curve. Things like improvement in technology ( Moore’s Law), investment and accumulation of wealth, business and career growth are all prime examples.
When you hear stories of people who worked so consistently hard initially but with only very little to show for it, persisted long enough and suddenly success start to flood in an almost logic-defying way, that is exponential growth in action.
To many of us, it doesn’t make sense how or why progress that seemed almost impossible at first could arrive so suddenly and so big, so we conveniently call it “overnight success.” But it’s really not. Or many overnight were at least several years or even decades long.
Our biggest frustration with progress that increases exponentially — when our brains understands linearity better — is that we tend to quit on things way before we should. The territory of exponential growth is full of quitters. People expecting progress to happen linearly, growing commensurately with each application of effort, get shocked that it doesn’t happen that way, then give up before they get to the real juicy part of the exponential curve.
What’s worse, when we are in exponential growth territory, good feedback can seem bad. We look at feedback, showing a pathetic return for a huge application of effort and all we understand that to mean is that we are in the wrong career, or chasing the wrong goal, or in the wrong job.
We often need a lot of examples to really understand how exponential growth works but its fascinating when we do. Here are a few more examples:
Investment and Wealth accumulation: The power of exponential growth is experienced in investments and accumulation of wealth mainly due to the power of compound interest. Of Warren Buffett’s $87.4 billion net worth, $87 billion of it came after his 50th birthday, and $84 billion of it came after his 60th.
Growth of Student Allowance: Here’s a fun one. A father complained that his son’s allowance of $5 per week was too much. The son replied, “Okay, Dad. How about this arrangement? You give me a penny on first day of the month, 2 cents on the second, 4 cents on the third, 8 cents on the fourth, and so on for every day of the month.” It sounded like a good money-saving proposal so the father agreed. But a penny that doubles every day of the month would be $10,737,418.24 on the last day of a 31-day month! Amazing, isn’t it? Blame the father all you like for his bad mathematics, but the reality is that exponential growth is just not intuitive.
Entrepreneurship and business growth: Bloggers, Youtubers, social media influencers etc often talk about the trend towards exponential growth in things like website traffic, subscribers, followers, and so on. Top Medium writer Shannon Ashley recently wrote about how she took 9 months of insane, everyday writing to reach 5K followers, then more than doubled that figure to reach 11K in the 3 months that followed. Exponential growth if there ever was one. And only one example out of several.
Exponential growth curve are typified by their J-shape: a long almost linearly stagnant line, then a sudden rise where things takes an upward leap in a very non-intuitively amazing way.
The biggest mistake we make when thinking of exponential growth, that often lead to our downfall, is that we often think that saying something is “exponential” means it happens fast. No, it doesn’t.
Exponential growth means starting from zero then to being small for a long time, then things accumulate on itself in a non-obvious way, until a point is reached where growth explodes.
And this is what often stumbles us with progress. We continue to put in the work — huge efforts unrelentingly, but progress, cruel progress, hides in the dark, remaining almost non-existent, and happens too slowly to notice for a long long time, until boom! Things blow up.
The interesting thing is this:
If you make a graph of the boy’s daily allowance in the example above, the upward part of the J-shaped curve only started taking shape around day 26! The same applies to the other examples. They are all typified by the fact that, initially, it seemed not much progress was happening for a looooong time.
This is a crucial insight.
We are often tempted to look for what comes fast and comes big. So, we expect the same of progress: to come fast and come big. We ignore the fact that progress is often exponential: starting off very small, usually from ground zero and then grows very slowly initially and for a while until, if we stick around long enough, compounding do its magic.
Progress, real progress starts in the dark when almost no one is noticing. It even arrives looking like failure, looking like a loss, arriving in trickles, until it — if allowed to run its course — builds into a deluge.
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Why Progress Often Frustrates Us (And What To Do About It)
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