Success Is Nonlinear: Why Most People Give Up Before The Rewards

Most people think that effort and success are always directly linked - the more effort you put in, the more success you get out. But success is actually nonlinear. This misunderstanding is why the mass majority of people give up before they reach the rewards.

People Think The More Effort You Put In, The More Success You Get Out.

This is what people think success looks like:

Here, the more effort you put in, the more success you get out. The relationship is linear. It’s a simple story to understand - input equals output. It’s a story we’re sold almost everywhere we look in mainstream media.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb reminds us that our brains love this linear causality relationship. Taleb writes in Fooled By Randomness: 

“People think that if, say, two variables are causally linked, then a steady input in one variable should always yield a result in the other one. Our emotional apparatus is designed for linear causality... If you do not feel that you are going anywhere, your emotions will cause you to become demoralized.”

If this relationship breaks down - say you work hard for 2-weeks straight to build a blog and then publish it to less than 100 readers (mostly friends and family) in the first month - you get discouraged. You worked hard, but it didn’t translate to success. Input didn’t equal output. 

It would be very easy for you to abandon this project with a simple “it didn’t work” excuse if you don’t understand that...

Success Is Nonlinear.

Success isn’t a straight line upwards. It’s erratic, with ups and downs, and long periods of no progress. And then when you win, you win big.

Our brains don’t like this story because it’s not very neat. “I worked hard for 12-years and accomplished nothing, and then one day, everything clicked, and now I’m rich,” just doesn’t have a great ring to it.

But that’s closer to how success works:

It’s hard for people to understand why suddenly, with one additional move, they see a giant, disproportionally large impact.

Taleb uses the example of a sandcastle. Say you spend hours building a sandcastle on the beach, and then with one additional grain of sand, the whole structure tumbles. Taleb writes:

“It could be said that the last grain of sand is responsible for the destruction of the entire structure. What we are witnessing here is a nonlinear effect resulting from a linear force exerted on an object. A very small additional input, here the grain of sand, caused a disproportionate result... Popular wisdom has integrated many such phenomena, as witnessed by such expressions as ‘the straw that broke the camel’s back’ or ‘the drop that caused the water to spill.’”

You’re looking for this disproportionate result. Most people quit on the downslopes because they don’t understand that the amount of work you put in does not correlate to the amount of success you enjoy at any given moment.

I make this mistake as much as anyone else. Just ask my wife how many of my “ideas” have died after a few months because of a lack of perceived progress. It’s most of them (and counting)! It’s easy to give up on the downslopes.

Here’s Taleb again: 

“Reality rarely gives us the privilege of a satisfying linear positive progression: You may study for a year and learn nothing, then, unless you are disheartened by the empty results and give up, something will come to you in a flash.”

This sudden flash is that big arrow upward. It’s a rare event that changes the game.

Getting through long periods of no progress is necessary for success. For example, here’s what my visitors looked like on Wealest.com in the first month after the site went live: 

In the beginning, no one showed any interest in my site (and most of these readers were my friends and family). The amount of energy I put in to build the blog did not correlate to the same amount of success I got out. I wasn’t getting anywhere.

Here’s my traffic through 2022 with my first year highlighted for context:

Progress! Success happens in spurts and waves over time. It’s a bumpy, random, exhausting road that is very difficult to analyze in real-time and only obvious in hindsight.

The path is also emotionally and mentally exhausting. When the input does not equal output, it’s impossible to know when you’re reaching a tipping point. Most people give up before they find it.

Follow The Path That Has Some Early Success.

If success is nonlinear and occurs in spurts of huge gains, how do you know what projects to pursue and which ones to abandon given none of us have an infinite amount of time?

As a rule of thumb, follow the path that has shown some success relatively quickly.

Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert comic, lays this out in his book, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life, writing:

“My guideline for deciding when to quit is informed by a lifetime of trying dozens of business ideas, most of them failures… The pattern I noticed was this: Things that will someday work out well start out well. Things that will never work start out bad and stay that way. What you rarely see is a stillborn failure that transmogrifies into a stellar success. Small successes can grow into big ones, but failures rarely grow into successes.”

I saw this with my site. While my readership for Wealest was low shortly after going live, I still had two or three very engaged readers! This (minimal) early success was enough for me to keep pushing forward.

Does hard work really matter?

If effort and success don’t have a linear causality relationship (input does not always equal output), then should you stop working hard?

Of course not. Effort generates luck. Naval Ravikant writes in his “How To Get Rich” series that when you’re hustling and working hard and shaking things up with motion, you create opportunities.

Ravikant writes: 

It’s almost like mixing a petri dish and seeing what combines. Or mixing a bunch of reagents and seeing what combines. You’re generating enough force and hustle and energy that luck will find you.

I’ve found this to be true. Writing for Wealest has opened up opportunities I wouldn’t have had otherwise. I’ve connected with thought leaders & CEOs, built an ever-expanding newsletter list and an audience from scratch.

Hard work generates luck. It’s a necessary (but not sufficient) ingredient for nonlinear success. So keep going and mind those downslopes. You may just be a few moves away from that arrow straight upwards.

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Adams, Scott. How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life. Portfolio/Penguin, 2014.

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets. Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

You can find Naval Ravikant’s entire “How To Get Rich” series here.