Growth, Novelty, and Preservation

Note: This was heavily inspired by toonalfrink's recent shortform post [LW(p) · GW(p)]

There's this Farnam Street blog post that says "if you can get 1 percent better each day for one year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done"

This always seemed a bit unrealistic to me, but until recently I wasn't able to pinpoint why. I think digging into this is important because it's easy to look back 1 year, see how much you've grown, and then extrapolate to your future and think "damn, there's no way I won't reach near-Elon status at some point in my life"

So why doesn't everybody become Elon?

It's because most people think: Growth = Novelty.

I thought that if I did new things, if I'm having unique experiences, getting unique insights, and having realizations, then I'm growing. This is mostly true, but it's missing an important component.

Decay.

After a lot of conferences I'll realize that I just need to stop overthinking things and network like my life depends on it. It just makes sense, and it feels like I've leveled up.

But then at the next conference I'm a bit nervous. Eventually I get into the swing of it and realize that I need to stop hesitating.

I've had two realizations, but I didn't level up twice. I leveled up once, decayed, and then got back to where I was before.

My initial response to this is "I internalized the realization more the second time". But this shows that I haven't actually grown more than how much I perceived I grew the first time.

In reality Growth = Novelty - Decay, which is equivalent to Growth = Novelty + Preservation

Preservation, compounding, consistency. Whatever you want to call it, it's important.

When I want to grow, instead of starting over ("what's the best upgrade to add to my life?") I should check whether I'm on track with the implementation of past good ideas ("what did my past self intend to do with this moment again?").

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