By Matata Mercy
When I was a kid at school we were told that in life you get what you put in, in other words the amount of effort you put into your work is directly proportional to the rewards that you get.
The assumption is that when you work hard, you will definitely be successful.
This is a philosophy that assumes that effort is linearly proportional to result which actually is not the case.
I have met very hardworking people who have ended up with poor results and on the other end of the spectrum, I have met people who work little or less but have achieved extraordinary results.
So, how do you end up with super linear results is it application of more and more effort or something else.
Today I will try to break down this riddle before me.
Although our teachers and coaches at school told us that in life you get what you put in, my own opinion is that this kind of advice could apply to other things but when it comes to the world of business.
The phenomena called superlinear returns exists vividly.
The truth is that if you make a product half good as that of your competitor in business, you will not get half of the customers but you will get none of the customers.
In short, all the customers will go to your competitor.
The return on performance in business is superlinear and most people will mistake that to be the problem of capitalism,they believe that when we do away with capitalism all will be well and fine.
But the truth is that changing the rules of the game will not do anything simply because superlinear returns are just a feature in the world and will continue to work their magic.
Actually, the same pattern does exist in other spheres of life like fame, military victories and even each and everything that ends up being beneficial to all of humanity.
And in all of these, the funny thing is that the rich will always get richer.
One thing that needs to be noticed is that we cannot understand the world without understanding superlinear returns.
And we need to understand superlinear returns especially for us who are ambitious and who would like to do something tangible or of value in this world.
This is something that we need to know because it is the critical wave that we shall have to ride on.
One fundamental question that a person could ask is, what are the different scenarios that lead to superlinear returns?
To me, there are only two aspects and one is threshold and the other is exponential growth.
One of the most clear cases of superlinear returns is when you are working on something that grows exponentially and an example such a thing could be bacterial culture.
If the person working on it is good enough or an expert, the results will be exponential growth. While in business, most especially startups, exponential growth happens.
Some startups grow exponentially and usually these are the kinds of startups that become highly valuable.
Although most of the startups fail, the few successful startups will always have high growth rates and eventually will grow into valuable companies as a result of the network effects that are associated with them.
Most of the startups will have low growth rates and might eventually fail.
Paul Graham, the founder of y combinator advises startup founders to focus on growth rate rather than the absolute numbers.
Truth be told, in the early days the absolute numbers are usually low and this can discourage the founders.
But focusing on the growth rate in the long run will most likely result into exponential growth.
One thing that beats my understanding is that if exponential growth, p,is directly proportional to time,t then the result of that growth after the time t should be equivalent to p to the power of t.
As humans, we are just trying to get used to exponential growth although several times we have seen the results clear in our society.
This concept is not rooted in our DNA composition. But exponential growth principle could easily be applied to farming especially in herding.
For example, the more animals you have, the more they produced each and every year but the limiting factor here will be land for herding the animals.
The land does not expand and so this limits the exponential growth.
This concept also applies to the ancient empires where the more territory you conquered, the more armies you built and the more territory you acquired.
Since knowledge is one of the things that have exponential growth, meaning when you learn to read, it is easier for you to learn anything else out there.
In the modern era, empires of ideas that are small in size can create bombs that can easily destroy those old seemingly large empires of the ancient times.
In some situations, exponential growth can also happen as a step function especially in the world of sports, where more effort applied by the winning team will not make any great difference in the outcome.
For example if a team wins a soccer match by 1-0, the reward got at the end of the match is a win.
Any extra effort will not change anything about the win. The win will just remain a win whether the margin is large or small.
One interesting phenomena that includes both sources of superliner returns is fame, which grows exponentially when some of the exciting fans who have had an encounter with a famous person rub shoulders with others end up converting them to also become fans.
But there is a threshold and it is concentrated, the fundamental reason is that there is so much room in the world of fame since there is a specific number of people that a person can know.
But the most important scenario combining both sources of superliner returns is learning.
Knowledge accumulates as we keep learning and therefore the more we learn, the more we know.
Once you have learnt to read, it becomes pretty easy for you to learn other things. But the most important thresholds are the ones that end up opening up new discoveries.
People like Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin did exactly that. How can we discover situations with superliner returns?
One way of discovering superliner returns is to seek work that compounds.
By doing great work, you will end up with more work and the cycle will continue to expand this happens especially when you are building infrastructure or building an audience or just a brand.
One interesting situation is about learning,work can compound when you keep learning more about it.
Initially, when you start learning about a new field you might feel like as if you are not getting anywhere and you are failing but as long as you keep going and learning from your mistakes, you will get better.
The territory of superlinear returns is not static, with ambition and curiosity you can get the most rewards from it but the most important aspect of the two is curiosity although ambition will help you to climb to the peaks.
While keeping close to interesting questions might help you to grow a mountain beneath that had never existed before.
Good luck 🍀🍀 🍀
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