Discouraged? Break Free From Linear Thinking!

I took this photo of the Orion Constellation with my cell phone.*

This would have been impossible only months before.

Notice if you click on the image to view it full sized, you can see the slight coloration and blurry middle “star” in Orion’s Belt? That is actually the Orion Nebula, a giant gas and dust cloud that is 1,600 light-years from us. That’s about 16,000,000,000,000,000 kilometers (give or take a few km). I captured an image of that light with my phone, taken through a car window.

What?

This is amazing! I stopped my car on an old country road, held my phone pressed up against the car window, and took a photo that would have been tricky to get with a high-end camera from decades earlier. By the way, I took this two years ago, which means the technology has only improved since then.

We have become so accustomed to our changing technology that we tend to take it for granted. But worse, we tend to be stuck in linear thought patterns, when much of the universe seems to unfold exponentially.

We tend to think this way:

Take one penny, add 1 each day for a month. On day 2 you’ll have 2, add 1 and you get 3, add 1 to get 4 etc... and at the end of a month, you have 30 cents.

When much of the universe that we're a part of acts this way:

Take one penny and double it, now you have 2 (the same result from day two above, which is one reason our brains suck at this), now double it and you'll have 4, double again you’ll have 8 etc...

By day 10 you'll have $5.12

By day 20 you'll have $5,242.88

By the end of the month, you'll have $5,368,709.12

But we tend to think like we’ll just have 30 cents.

I know many of you have heard this analogy before, but I challenge you to start looking for patterns where this can help you better judge your own actions in life.

One short example: It took me about a week to go from 100 followers on Steemit to 120. But it only took me two days to go from 295 to 315.

Now I realize this isn't a perfect logarithmic scale. I also realize there are many variables here besides time and number of followers. There’s popularity of recent posts, the frequency of posts, overall quality of posts, how much promoting I’m working on, etc...

But I mention this to encourage some of you who may be feeling like you're working hard but not seeing results. Not only here on Steemit, but in many businesses and investing ventures, the beginning stages can be arduous.**

Hang in there for a while. Keep working. Keep improving. Be consistent. Track your results as you go and watch for these patterns. It can mean the difference between perseverance and knowing when to pivot or maybe even throwing in the towel.

I’m writing a full article about this where I plan on going deep into the woods on the topic. Watch for that soon. In the meantime, keep an eye out for these types of patterns which are not intuitive, but when detected could have a major impact on your life.

Things like:

• Cryptocurrency adoption rates.
• Compounding interest.
• Inflation.
• Your biological aging processes.
• 3D Printing Tech
• Bacterial growth.

And especially, look for these patterns in the fruits of your own labor. That pay-off may be closer than you think.

 

 

 

*My cell phone is a 2015, LG-V10

**When I publish my full article on this, I’ll also be discussing some inverse relationships, such as building strength. In weight training, a new athlete will make progress very quickly, where the elite-level athlete has to utilize tremendous resources just to make the smallest of improvements.

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