@build_in_public

Paul Graham is the founder of Y Combinator, responsible for some of the biggest companies in the world like Airbnb or Dropbox or Reddit. This is what Paul Graham wrote. Great work happens by focusing consistently on something you're genuinely interested in.

When you pause to take stock, you're surprised how far you've come. The reason we're surprised is that we underestimate the cumulative effect of work. Writing a page a day doesn't sound like much, but if you do it every day, you'll write a book a year.

That's the key, consistency. People who do great things don't get a lot done every day. They get something done rather than nothing.

If you do work that compounds, you'll get exponential growth. Most people who do this do it unconsciously, but it's worth stopping to think about. Learning, for example, is an instance of this phenomenon.

The more you learn about something, the easy dear it is to learn more. Growing an audience is another. The more fans you have, the more new fans they'll bring you.

The trouble with exponential growth is that the curve feels flat in the beginning. Isn't it? Is still a wonderful exponential curve, but we can't grasp that intuitively, so we underrate exponential growth in its early stages.

Something that grows exponentially can become so valuable, it's worth making an extraordinary effort to get it started. But since we underrate exponential growth early on, this too is mostly done unconsciously. People push through the initial, unrewarding phase of learning something new.

Because they know from experience that learning new things always take. It's an initial push where they grow their audience one fan at a time because they have nothing better to do. If people consciously realized they could invest in exponential growth, many more would do it.