The Longer It Takes Do, The Larger The Competitive Advantage In Doing It
The world is flush with quick dopamine. You can make a TikTok video in minutes and get thousands of views in seconds. A Twitter thread that took you ten minutes to write can go viral with millions of impressions overnight. And it feels really good.
When you can “win” this quickly, your brain rewires itself to start looking for these kinds of instant gratification. And it becomes brutally hard to stick with things that take much longer.
But that’s where the real competitive advantage lives. When you do things that take years, not days, you compound your efforts with small, incremental gains, and immediately escape competition from anyone with a shorter time horizon.
The longer it takes to do, the larger the competitive advantage in doing it.
The Harder The Task, The More Value You Create In Doing It Well.
It’s hard AF to write a great movie script. It’s a complex beast of 110 pages that must take the reader on an emotional journey by telling a story they can’t put down. There can’t be any loose ends. Or boring moments. Or inauthentic reactions.
For for the gatekeepers of Hollywood to even consider turning a script into a movie, it must be one of the best things they’ve ever read. High bar much?
And because the task is so difficult, the more value you create when you do it well.
This goes for anything that’s really hard to do. Imagine what it took for Steve Jobs to build the perfect cell phone. Or Elon Musk to build an electric vehicle that is cool to drive (I recently drove a Tesla and am sold on it). Or Jeff Bezos to figure out cloud computing with Amazon Web Services.
Doing hard tasks well = ⬆ value.
Anyone can post on TikTok. Anyone can write a thread on Twitter. Anyone can do makeup tutorials (which is why there are so many makeup tutorials).
But most people can’t write a great screenplay. It can take anywhere from six months to a year for my wife and me to write a screenplay we’re proud of. Very few people have the patience to stick with the same project for a year. They think they can write a great screenplay over the weekend. But they’re wrong.
And here’s why.
Here’s the secret behind all complex works of art: it’s the power of iteration that drives progress.
Working on something for 1 hour for 30 days will produce a better product than working on something for 10 hours over 3 days.
Because the small, incremental gains you make each day compound over time.
When Your Work Gets A Little Better Everyday, It Compounds Over Time.
This is ultimately why the longer something takes to do, the larger competitive advantage you have in doing it: compounding.
When you compound your efforts, you’re making better what you did yesterday. Which was already better than the day before and the day before that and the day before that.
Anytime you see, read, watch, or experience something so unbelievably good, you can’t imagine how they did it - here’s the secret: they did a little bit each day, and got better as they went.
That’s why something that took a year to make will be better than that same thing built over a weekend. Compounding your effort over time is the key to building a competitive advantage.
Look at the traffic on Wealest as an example. Anyone can write and publish an article on the internet in a day. But very few people can do it every week for years… and get better as they go.
This is what that looks like:
I didn’t have an advantage five years ago, but I do now. Because no one can start at almost 200K pages views. They have to start at 0 and work their way up.
And remember the quick wins and dopamine I talked about in the intro? Very few people want to put in the time to start at 0 and build from there. There’s too many other quick wins that pay off now.
The chart above has five years of compounding. Imagine what it’s going to look like in another ten? Or twenty? It’s kind of scary.
There’s no end to the progress you can make when you improve a little bit each day.
The Big Payout Only Comes At The End of The Compounding Period.
Here’s another secret of compounding - you don’t really notice when it’s happening.
If I work on a scene in a screenplay for a couple of hours, and I make it a little bit better, and read it after the day’s work is done, it reads pretty much like the same scene it was the day before. And each time I come back to it, it’s the same experience: it always reads generally like the same scene.
BUT, if you were to read the very first version and the most recent version - what a difference!
Most people don’t compound their work because they don’t get the dopamine hit of improving because you don’t even notice you’re improving!
It’s the opposite of instant gratification. There’s NO gratification until the VERY END of the compounding process.
That’s why shipping something you’ve been working on for months or years is so satisfying. You’ve been delaying gratification for so long, that when you do cash in, it feels fucking great.
When you compound your efforts in the same direction, you are delaying gratification to get a larger “payout” at the end of the compounding period.
And there’s no way to short-cut this waiting period. Time is the only way to compound value - slow, incremental constant progress over decades.
As Warren Buffett says: “Time is the friend of the wonderful business, the enemy of the mediocre.” If you’re compounding in the right direction, time is your best friend.
And that’s your advantage. If you can compound your work, you’ll leave behind everyone else who’s looking for a quick win.
The longer something takes to do - the more compounding required to make that thing - the larger the competitive advantage in doing it. And the sooner you start, the better off you’ll be.
Start now.