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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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It sounds extreme, but it actually isn't. The world is full of patterns of almost casual long-term commitments: marriages, 30-year mortgages, having kids, picking a major in college...
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We tend to be afraid of long-term involvement commitments because we tend to think they need to be heavily overspecified up front. But a 10 year involvement commitment does not involve a 10 year *plan.* All it implies is picking a direction you'll be muddling-through towards.
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The "plan" for a good marriage is basically "stay involved." The plan for being a successful parent is "stay an involved parent for 18 years." There are no milestones and detailed gantt charts.
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In fact, the main thing to commit to is a negative, to NOT steer. Because once you develop momentum staying directionally stable is not about doing stuff. Throwing away the steering wheel. I wrote a narrow version of this argument in blog post
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Throwing away the steering wheel, setting long-range involvement horizons... it doesn't guarantee that n an ESS (evolutionarily stable strategy) like tit-for-tat will emerge, but it opens up the possibility that one will
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