Venkatesh Rao

Level 4 is the level at which the adage "Rome wasn't built in a day" applies. In my graph, I've estimated the "collaboration flywheel moment" at the 5y mark, which seems about right. Effort peaks around the 7y mark, and you don't hit the sustainable plateau till like year 10.

The individual effort-rate is actually the same across all levels. Everybody still has only ~16 waking hours in a day, and whether you are building cathedrals or just doing laundry, humans still average only about 100-150 watts of power output. So where does the difference lie?

The difference lies in accepting horizons of commitment. To build a production community, you have to say to yourself something like "so long as this is alive, I'm going to stay involved in it, for at least 10 years."

One of the projects I'm helping kick off at the @yak_collective is literally a 10-year project: the yak rover, with a goal of getting a rover to mars. And yeah, at this stage it is a borderline a joke, but there's a few of us actually getting started...

I have no idea how far we'll get. Certainly if we actually make it to Mars, far more talented people than me will have to get involved. I'm pretty much just futzing around with 3d printing toys and learning to control motors with arduinos. Hardly a space program.

But at whatever level of ability I can bring to the party, I've sort of decided I'm willing to keep tinkering and muddling through on this project for 10 years, while I have some good company. It's like deciding to write a difficult book as opposed to a quick-turn fad book.

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.*