Too much energy has been put into measuring progress by focusing on quarterly results, discrete semesters, or weak signals like employing institutions, whilst neglecting the true elephant in the room which is compounding growth and its superpowers.

What really got me stumbling into this realization is reflecting on sama’s journey, and its projection into the future (i.e now present). Still, I think his greatest years are yet ahead of him.

Early beginnings seem humble in retrospect, and for outsiders it looks that some accomplished people just sky-rocketed out of nowhere. Alec Radford is a great testimony to this.

However, I’d argue that the growth curve took off a long time before the spotlight caught up. Everyone now wants to learn from young sama who was relatively (on a global scale) unknown at the time and overlooked. Yet, despite being early he was able to be right on the important things and just believed in the mission for a long period of time. Think about it, all the things said were at a time where none of the present happened yet.

What’s interesting about this realization and hidden between the ashes, is that YOU can be young and stand on the correct landscape of ideas and ambitions; and it just takes compounding (time) to get the results of those ideas and the elevation that people start taking notice of you. In other words, if you have a high conviction on something that can become big then you should relentlessly double down on it regardless of where you are at on the socio-economic ladder.

Perhaps the best thing one can do is to operate on intense iterations of weekly cycles. I’ve been amazed how much one can get done in a week when focused and how much the plain of sight becomes clearer for what to come next. This necessarily brings with it lots of dead-ends and failed attempts, but the taste of what works and what to work on is priceless later on.

The other element to this is having an extreme amount of self-belief. You, like a bird raised in a nest, need one day to pave your own path and conquer the world. You might fall several times while trying to fly, get hit in the head, choose the wrong home, but if you keep executing relentlessly progress is guaranteed.

You might be sometimes right for the wrong reasons, or not fully anticipate and understand why things succeeded the way they did. It seems in life that sometimes you need to be right on a few things, and okay to be wrong on many others (sigh power law). You see this very well in soccer penalties and how unexpected winners and losers emerge.

Another example is driving a car when you just woke up, it can be fine. You most likely will reach your destination, despite not being fully focused during your drive. There’s an element of incompleteness tolerance that we (as a society) haven’t overcome when it comes to assessing success likelihood.

I’m convinced that the world is big enough to absorb different philosophies and sufficient capacity to foster success via different perspectives. I don’t think there’s one single way of achieving things in life.

Surprisingly, I think working on something you find interesting and are curious about is sufficient if the prior stuff mentioned is taken seriously. It’s weird and sounds like very simple advice; “you’re telling me to change the world I just have to work on things that I find interesting?!”

The list of out of reach ideas suddenly becomes attainable after establishing an attack vector. Perhaps this advice doesn’t apply to all disciplines, at least not to create startups. But if you’re passionate about technology, and you accept that technology is following the curves of the likes of Ray Kurzweil; then I think you don’t have to worry about this being bad advice.