So I just had dinner with two of my close friends, Ji Li and Dr. Wen Shi. One topic we touched on was our personal life philosophies. I assure you we don’t talk about serious stuff all the time, but sometimes it comes up! (In fact, if you had actually sat through the 3 hours, you would have thought all of us were total retards).
As a direct result of tonight’s conversation, I decided to write a few posts about my personal philosophies on life. Here is part I, my philosophy on effort.
If you read my about me section, you’ll probably see that I’m involved in a lot of different things. I often get asked how I could possibly manage having all these commitments at once. My secret weapon is in fact not brilliance, but what I like to call “compounding effort”.
The basic tenants of “compounding effort” is to simply push yourself 5% harder every year. I know it sounds simple and trivial, but the overall effect can be quite shocking. Indeed, humans in general are incredibly bad at recognizing anything non-linear. We really do not understand multiplication, and thus have very little intuition on how fast “compounding” really is. This is possibly a direct result of the environment we live in. Very few things in nature are non-linear. To add to the problem, we also have a need to see tangible results. The combination of these two qualities is that we as a race, especially Americans, rarely understand the need for long periods of sustained effort.
Take my “compounding effort” rule for example. Here is what happens to Person A’s efficiency over the course of 20 years if he / she follow my rule strictly.
That means compared to Person B who did not push him / herself, Person A is 3 times more efficient at the 20 year mark! Person A can do in a day what takes 3 days for Person B! How can Person B possibly hope to compete with Person A at that point? In fact, I can define a new quantity “effective life experience”, which is based on the amount of work a person actually does (think of it as the area underneath the curve of the effort curve).
There is something I’m sweeping under the carpet of course. Specifically, it takes time to become more efficient. Personally, I think I spend around 30% of my time just to become more efficient in the next year. So naturally this leads to an optimization question. Assuming I start pushing myself when I’m 10, and will stop working when I’m 60, how long should I push myself before the function is no longer optimized? Below, I’ve plotted a few life experience vs years curves.
Notice that for all of these curves, it is NOT worth it to push yourself forever. There is in fact a point at which you should stop pushing yourself, and use 100% of your efficiency. Also notice that the maximum life experience point, pushing yourself 5% harder a year is akin to accomplishing TWICE as much as a person who only pushed him / herself 2% harder a year, and is akin to accomplishing THREE times as much as a person who never bothered pushing at all. From the graph, it is clear that everyone should be pushing themselves until at least they are 30, which unfortunately most people do not do.
As my parting words, here is Jack’s intended life experience equation.
