A student came to office hours this week asking about what he should focus his spare time on for the last few months before he starts his investment banking job in the fall. His basic apprehension was that if he were to pick the wrong thing to be learning (e.g. should he learn about AI, learn about financial markets, or put his attention into something else), he would be “wasting” his time and “lose opportunities.”

I told him that it doesn’t really matter what he does right now, and that he ought to just work on anything that’s of interest to him. He’s about to drink from a fire hose in banking so he’ll get plenty of technical skills over the next two or three years. It’s better to learn anything, or even develop anything—I told him the best use of his time would be to improve his physical fitness and relationships because his time for those will be limited in banking—than to spend too much time thinking about what is “optimal” or “perfect.”

The broader point I want to make here is that people often are afraid of starting something because they think the effort might be wasted. I don’t think that’s really going to limit this student—he’s a high-energy self-starter—but I certainly have felt decision paralysis around picking the “right” path forward. What is this fear about?

Being Afraid to Start

I think this fear has a few dimensions—fear of uncertainty, fear of pain and a long grind, and even fear of missing out on a better opportunity.

1)      At least in some subcultures—let’s call it the entrepreneurship-adjacent lifehacking community—there’s an obsession with efficiency and outcomes. People want to optimize their sleep, their workouts, their daily commute, their diet, everything. If something isn’t optimal, some people don’t even want to start it, because the idea of doing something messy and inefficient is just repulsive. The problem with this viewpoint is that efficiency is downstream of inefficiency. It’s only by starting an inefficient, clunky process that we figure out how to optimize and streamline it. I can’t figure out the perfect diet for me without trying foods that don’t work for me.

2)      Most worthwhile projects do not produce immediate returns, or immediate positive feedback. That means we have to grind through a long period of low returns, or no returns, before we get any kind of positive feedback at all (embracing uncertainty). This is like investing in a private asset that has no market price signal at all for many years. That will stop a lot of people from even starting. For example, I might want millions of people to read my notes one day. But the first piece I sent out from this blog was to just over 100 people. It’s entirely possible that I’ll hit a million subscribers one day. But that is probably going to take years of writing regularly before I get there.

3)      Most worthwhile projects also involve significant investment, and what feels really bad is the feeling of regret around an investment. In finance, if I buy stock A, that means I can’t use that money to buy Stock B. If Stock B goes up 300% and Stock A stays flat, that is going to feel really bad. That’s the same emotion that can stop a person from committing to Creative Project A over Creative Project B. Rather than accepting the possibility of feeling regret, we often decide to do nothing at all. We can call this the fear of making a mistake, or the fear of missing out. Whatever we call it, it can block action for many of us.

Long Feedback Loops

The truth is, all effort looks wasted until it compounds.

Diet and exercise are a “project” where a person that follows a regimen with reasonable discipline is basically guaranteed to get the results they want. If I want to cut excess fat or add muscle mass, and I follow my plan, I will get those results. But I won’t get them on the first day, the first week, and maybe not even the first month. And that whole time I’m waiting for visible results—the positive feedback—I’m suffering through the pain and discomfort of a workout I’m not used to. If I do a hard workout the first week, and a crystalline alien creature that has no conception of how muscles and bones work observes my suffering ("why doesn't Ross, the largest friend, simply eat the other friends"), it might conclude that my effort was wasted.

Research and development spending is a good market analogy for this. When the government gives research grants for frontier science, or companies allocate billions of dollars and thousands of people to productizing new technologies, there is no guarantee that any given research effort will produce results. In fact, we know that most of them won’t. But in the aggregate, we know that something out of that effort will bear fruit. University and government investment into quantum mechanics in the 1930s and onwards led to the discovery of atomic energy, microcomputers, and ultimately, the Internet.

In our personal lives, in my view, no effort is wasted. Every action we take leads to something because the world is unpredictable. Our action puts a million unnoticeable things in motion, which sometimes rebound back to us in ways we can’t predict.

A Different Frame: What Did I Learn?

To break out of this mindset, I offer two things: first, a belief in the power of compounding, and second, rather than focusing on whether the effort was wasteful or productive, asking ourselves what we learned from the effort.

On the power of compounding, if you don’t really buy into it but want to, just keep reading my stuff. I believe it so I’ll be talking about it over and over. Eventually, it will seep into your mindset and belief system too.

On asking ourselves what did we learn, literally every action we take is a learning opportunity. Every time I publish a blog post I learn something about how to express my ideas and to what extent they resonate with other people. The best thing we can do is take even a weak hypothesis we hold about something we’re interested in and start messing around, even if it’s not perfect.

When we ask ourselves what we learned from each small action we took, we start getting that feeling of compounding—like the learning is building upon itself—much sooner. The compounding is working even if we don’t ask about the learning, but asking brings our attention and awareness to it, making the entire process feel easier.

Exercise

Journal on the following or discuss with a friend.

1)      Noticing

Where in my life do I feel fear about starting something, because I’m not sure if it’s the right path to take? Where am I afraid of investing a lot of effort, and not getting anything out of it?

If I assumed there was no such thing as wasted effort, and every action leads to compounding mastery on the area I’m interested in, what would I do?

2)      Action

What’s the smallest action step I can take toward starting the new thing?

(You knew this was coming, but not as step #2!)

3)      Awareness

As I enter the earliest stages of doing the thing that I was afraid of wasting effort on, what feels different if I ask myself what I learned?

If I publish a piece of content for the first time and nobody reads it, can I identify something I learned from the process? If I start to dig into a subject area that feels overwhelming (e.g., finance), can I isolate even one fact I learned in the first 15 minutes of reading?

What if every day, I took a tiny action to build on that small scrap of knowledge I got on the first day?