Venkatesh Rao

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.

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...

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.

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.