Venkatesh Rao

I'm not very ambitious, and am pretty lazy and mediocre as far as average effort rate goes. But I do tend to stick with things for really long. Most of my current projects are years old. Some are over a decade old. So I'm optimistic :D

ie, it's not a sprint, it's not a marathon, it's not a "heavy lift" single herculean effort. It's simply the willingness to keep generally heading in a particular direction, at whatever pace/duty cycle (on-off pattern) you can manage, *for a really long time.*

Funny how sheer quantities of lightly committed "involvement time" can be a substitute for a LOT of rarer, more impressive traits like intelligence, peak effort, knowledge, insightfulness etc. More time substitutes dumb trial and error for basically everything.

As the saying goes, 80% of life is just showing up. And if you decide you're just going to show up in a certain activity for long enough, many interesting things can happen that you would have NO talent for under shorter time horizons.

Can't recall where I saw this, but aptitude can be defined as the time it takes you to learn something. It's not that a genius can learn things you can't. Most of the time, it just means it will take you 10-100x longer to get there.

Tortoise-hare something something. If you're not a genius, just check out how long it takes your friendly neighborhood genius to do something and simply commit to doing it too, over 10x time.

The thing that accomplishes that being a genius doesn't is open up potential for collaboration, since there's a lot more people with ordinary levels of aptitude than geniuses. You can collaborate with everybody else who is at your level. You can do overall bigger things.

This sounds like yet another sermon about long-term thinking, but it isn't. It's a sermon about long-term *commitment.* It doesn't take much upfront thinking. I mean, fairly dim people seem to get married at 22 without much thought and make a successful 30-40 marriage out of it.