Ask HN: Peter Theil Power laws for individual Peter theil in his book Zero to One, mentions about power law. He says that some industries, some GTM etc are going to provide very high returns compared to others and we as an individual should think really hard to answer such questions.
It's a very philosophical task. How are you following it? |
In studying different models of personality, one comes across a similar phenomenon where an individual tends to naturally close in on some smaller set of capacities that they can/do lean on to do huge amounts of work.
You can call it "having a specific personality" in that it's a center of gifts, reliable energy activities for that individual, etc. but it's not usually fully conscious and you need to study a lot to identify and develop this. Power law principles really obviously apply. You can really push yourself here. Most people don't realize how much and how to push without becoming a workaholic.
What I did then, personally, was to identify these centers in myself and then attempt to change all of my work focus to rely more on those capacities.
As it turns out I had already started to do the exact reverse of that around quarter-life, which is common as a resting/recovering function that is very easily interpreted as "new career mission".
So I backed out of that a bit, used the recovery centers for recovery purposes, and maneuvered more in the direction of reliable, natural leverage.
This was in a way very difficult because like many of us, I wasn't raised in an environment where this was taught or even thought to be healthy. So even my inner voice was extremely pessimistic.
(But I was also used to this from coaching groups and corporate teams. You can tell a tiger it's a tiger, but if it's already learned to scratch out its name on paper, maybe it really wants to hear that it's a master calligrapher.)
So there were many difficulties, but overall it's worked really well so far.
(I am not completely sure if this answers your question but I want to think I understood what you were getting at :-))
I took a number of personality tests, enough to give me some things to confirm about myself--OK, this is easy, I know these vague things I'm good at, great. This part wasn't as impressive.
Aside: I later became certified in personality assessment and you quickly learn that it doesn't impress people to learn things they "already know" because they don't realize it's the iceberg principle and there are hidden power law implications at work.
I'll give an example of the specifics with one test: four-letter type. Mainly since it's familiar to lots of people. (Some call it MBTI, but that's really like referring to any random car as a Ford.)
I showed my coach the results I got and he said, "well you know with a strength in the area of this N here, the theory is that you shouldn't be doing its opposite, S, for more than around 20% of your workday."
This was a ??? for me. Inverse power law? That's something useful to know. So I did a lot of research on this. I did not want to be relying on my weaknesses for my day job.
I learned that my specific N gifts were things like contingency planning, probabilistic intuiting, mental process organization, big-picture thinking, etc. But I was only using this maybe 10% of my day, max.
The rest of my time was spent on S stuff: Little-picture code debugging, getting lost in the details of huge processes, remembering tons of little to-do items, being productive on an hourly and daily basis, improvising much of the time by accepting & working on the long-form development of new things I hadn't done before.
It quickly became obvious that these S items had become the foundation of my workaholism. So you could say that the unreliable results were due to building on my weaknesses.
So, over time I decided to reverse the whole thing (big hand-waves here, this is a multi-year journey).
These days, I spend lots more work on the big picture. I don't start work on a project before I have the big-picture processes completely in place, and also connected to the little-picture work (the transitional gift is one that can be developed).
When little-picture work threatens to take over, I don't mess around. I back out of the workday, get another big-picture view. How would I describe the process? What's gone wrong with the process/system? Then I ask what a big-picture solution is.
This automatically created what I call a "cat life" pattern, where the S-type work is concerned. What it looks like is, I am observably more lazy maybe. I wait, think, plan (documented, but still it doesn't get tangled in details). But I'm in the mental/air domain. Then, when the gifts click, I know how to dive in, where to dive in, and I know I'm being efficient. I try to get in and get out fast, I keep a log, then I give the N side more space again while reviewing logs.
OK--I hope that's enough to get you an idea. This is just one area and it goes quite deep.
There are thousands of interesting models from personality tests to art analysis to technical performance analysis, and I've given them all as much of a chance as I could, being open to new ideas but watching the results.
The power law really applies to some of these in a very special way. And it's very individualized--I wouldn't recommend my own specific journey to anybody, and I learned that it can cause huge problems to do this. My power-method is another person's inverse.