A Pilgrimage Through Stagnation and Acceleration

Why does success so often lead to anti-climax and a sense of stagnation?

Why is creative work so perpetually frustrating ?

Why do you constantly feel like you are falling behind?

In an effort to recover from my recent mini-rut I spent quite a bit of time consuming material that, in retrospect, revolved around these questions.  I will try to synthesize several of the more promising items and see if I can’t push them a bit further.

Thrust and Drag

Venkat Rao, attempting to explain the phenomenon of the 10x engineer, proposes a model of creative work based on an analogy to the mechanical concepts of thrust and drag:

He defines thrust work as those tasks with the potential for super-linear performance improvements as a function of consistent extended blocks of deliberate practice:

…such exponential gains always involve positive feedback loops, and thrust tasks contain two of them: the autotelic loop within a session, and the longer-term deliberate practice benefits that carry over between sessions.  These two positive-feedback loops together basically create an addiction.

Drag comes from those tasks that do not allow for super-linear performance improvement and moreover, tend to distract us from thrust work, interrupting the feedback loops noted in the quote above.

The moral of the story – if you optimize your time around thrust work and minimize drag, in the long run you will find yourself far ahead of the competition.  I won’t rehash all the details.  If you haven’t yet read Venkat’s piece you should take a quick detour over to the Tempo blog.

What is Drag?

If you’re back then you know that Venkat focuses specifically on managing drag work.  These are the tasks that seem important, even urgent, but ultimately offer little leverage in the pursuit of meaningful long-term development.  The solution offered is to optimize your schedule around thrust work.

But, suppose you have perfected the art of schedule management…have you permanently defeated the scourge that is drag?

Of course not.  Ultimately drag is anything that distracts you from thrust work.  Biological needs are sources of drag.  You surely know at least a few people who periodically engage in near-manic bouts of creative effort, largely by ignoring their needs to eat, sleep, or maintain decent hygiene.

Venkat focuses on schedule management because it is an obvious limiting factor.  Schedule management, for many people is the low hanging fruit.  However, alleviating one source of drag will only enable a temporary period of productive acceleration before another, previously latent source of drag emerges as a limiting factor.  You might reconfigure your schedule only to realize some weeks later that your poor eating habits limit your energy, crippling your ability to stay alert and focused.  While your schedule remained a mess, the constant distractions had obscured the limitations imposed by deficient diet.

If we incorporate the potential impact of lurking drag, the Thrust/Drag model no describes a steady accumulation of creative thrust.  Instead it describes a punctuated series of episodic curves.  A multi-year trajectory might be visualized as follows:

 

Each individual creative episode is unsustainable by its very nature.  As a given episode accelerates, surpassing the sustainable long term trajectory, the thrust engine overwhelms the available supporting capabilities.  For example, consider a common episodic cycle in the development of a consumer web start-up.

Starting from point A above, the company (let’s call it thrust.ly):

• slowly builds its user base through organic word-of-mouth marketing
• user growth hits an inflection point and accelerates (point B)
• the company is featured on TechCrunch and traffic explodes (point C)
• …and then the site crashes (point D)

Just as momentum build to truly exciting levels…some new limitation appears squelching that momentum.  For thrust.ly, new user growth stagnates for a period of time while they patch up their back-end to handle new levels of traffic.  Point D represents the anti-climactic transition to a new episodic growth curve.  The main source of drag throughout the previous episode (lack of exposure) has been alleviated but a new source of drag (lack of scalability) quickly emerges as the limit to growth.

The same dynamics apply in the individual context that Venkat addresses.  You work on something for a long time gradually accumulating momentum.  Finally you hit a milestone, accolades follow, then after a brief period of excitement…anti-climax.  You achieved your big goal…now what?

The problem is that you outran your supporting capabilities and that deficit became a source of drag.  Perhaps you didn’t have systems in place to capture leads.  Perhaps you lacked the bandwidth necessary to follow up on all the new opportunities.  Perhaps, due to lack of experience, you pursued the wrong opportunities.  Perhaps you just didn’t know what to do next – you outran your existing knowledge base.

In one way or another new varieties of drag emerge.   The accelerating curve you had been riding becomes unsustainable and you find yourself mired in the slow build of the next episode.  This is what we experience as anti-climax and temporary stagnation.

Mindful Learning Curves

This cycle of acceleration and setback comports with another post by Venkat describing the Mindful Learning Curve:

Traditional learning curves are typically smooth and S-shaped.

They are smooth because they typically track only peak or trough performance.

They plateau for a different reason: they use the same performance metric for all levels of performance. This may work at the Olympics, but is deeply misguided in most real-world domains. Performance quality is something you measure differently as skill levels increase.

He offers the following graphic as an alternative:

Why might a long term learning curve evolve in this sort of pattern?  Venkat explores the question at the level of day-to-day energy and inspiration.  But if we are to interpret the cycles in the chart above as phenomena evolving over weeks, months, or years, then we need a similarly scaled driver.

Fortunately, the analogy to thrust and drag provides just such an explanation.  Superimposing a few additional curves yields following:

The green line represents a sustainable multi-year trajectory.  The blue lines indicate the trajectory of each individual performance episode.  If you could accurately forecast the shape of each curve then you could make a clean jump from one episode to the next wherever two blue lines intersect, producing a clean staircase progression.  Unfortunately, in the real world our timing is rarely so precise.

More often than not, we ride the high of each episode too long and then crash only when previously latent sources of drag become unbearable.  Recall Venkat’s claim:

These two positive-feedback loops together basically create an addiction.

That predictable behavioral pattern produces the saw-tooth function seen above.

Trials and Tribulations

Episodic acceleration also helps explain why creative work is so perpetually frustrating.  The 10x engineer is able to achieve such a great disparity relative to his peers only because so few of those peers persist in the pursuit of thrust work.  Most fall of the wagon because objectively they don’t seem to be making any meaningful progress.  And in fact, through the large majority of the curve that assessment is accurate.  Venkat concludes:

I’ll be 37 next month. I’d estimate that I’ve spent maybe 8-12 months overall in 10x mode. I am trying to systematically raise the “10x uptime” in my life, but it isn’t easy.

It may be damn near impossible.  The reality of exponential progress is that you spend the vast majority of your time slowly building momentum in order to enjoy the brief flashes of rapid progress.

If you’ve ever watched a space shuttle launch you have witnessed this phenomenon.  The countdown approaches zero, engines fire, smoke engulfs the launch platform…and the shuttle doesn’t budge.  Finally the countdown hits zero and the shuttle lifts almost imperceptibly off the platform…slowly accumulating velocity as it rises into the sky.  Not until nearly a minute after the engines ignite does it break the sound barrier.

That is the nature of thrust.  The ultimate surge as you approach escape velocity may be spectacular…but it is fleeting.  The space shuttle rapidly consumes its fuel and its momentum succumbs to the “drag” of Earth’s gravity.  Re-accelerating to escape velocity requires another arduous slow burn.

Paul Graham, in an essay exploring the differences between intelligence and wisdom, reflects on one facet of this phenomenon:

To me it was a relief just to realize it might be ok to be discontented. The idea that a successful person should be happy has thousands of years of momentum behind it. If I was any good, why didn’t I have the easy confidence winners are supposed to have? But that, I now believe, is like a runner asking “If I’m such a good athlete, why do I feel so tired?” Good runners still get tired; they just get tired at higher speeds.

Graham lacks “the easy confidence of winner” because most of the time he isn’t winning.  The episodic trajectory suggests that each win merely offers the opportunity to enter a new episode as a beginner.  Venkat argues that it is precisely this capacity to dynamically shift from a beginner’s mind to a winner’s mind, and back again, that enables the long term momentum:

Those who focus only on the peak get addicted to the highs that peaks bring. They abandon discipline and only attempt performance episodes when they feel the “flow” coming on. Unfortunately, without disciplined and regular “showing up,” these events become increasingly rare.  [Elizabeth] Gilbert’s daemon is not predictable but it expects you to be.

There is something like an economy of performers in your life. Every day you are a different person. Some days you are wealthy with flow, other days you are impoverished.

Many people are good at managing episodic tempo on either end of the spectrum. They might be good at peak performance or trough performance, or even both, but are bad at choosing the right tempo management behavior at the right time, and switching frictionlessly. It’s a mental trick — being able to swap out a peak game-mind for a trough game-mind very quickly.

In other words, creative work will always be frustrating because you can never be sure where you are in the process.  The best you can do is follow the most promising breadcrumbs and continually refine your own internal gyroscope.

A Different Sort of Rat Race

The skeptical reader at this point might contend that I am misrepresenting that nature of exponential growth, that we can only identify inflection points in retrospect, and that every point on an exponential curve looks exponential at the appropriate scale.  These would be reasonable criticisms if human intuition was scale invariant, but obviously that is not the case.  Quite the contrary, an unfortunate side effect of super-linear mindful learning curve is that you perpetually feel like you are falling behind.

Why?

Because paradoxically you are perpetually falling behind.  At any point in your journey you will tend to compare yourself to peers who have abandoned the long term trajectory and are progressing more quickly along comfortable linear paths.

Paul Graham continues the previously quoted comment as follows:

People whose work is to invent or discover things are in the same position as the runner. There’s no way for them to do the best they can, because there’s no limit to what they could do. The closest you can come is to compare yourself to other people. But the better you do, the less this matters. An undergrad who gets something published feels like a star. But for someone at the top of the field, what’s the test of doing well?
(emphasis mine)

Does the undergrad really feel like a star after getting something published?

Perhaps he does.  Perhaps he is approaching an episodic peak and his life feels like one uninterrupted peak performance.  But that can’t last forever.  As he accumulates thrust he also accumulates drag.  Soon he will have a choice to make: transition to the next episode and embark on a new slow build, or parlay his big break into a comfortable role that offers predictable linear advances.  If he persists along the mindful learning curve he will soon find himself falling behind peers who made the easy choice.

On this point Graham misses the mark.  The vast majority of people who “invent or discover things” are not at the top of their field, and they are hardly immune from the dissatisfaction that he describes.  For them, it is not unbounded expectations or unreachable potentialities that are frustrating.  Nor are potential comparisons to their most prodigious peers what they find most discouraging.  Most people learn to modulate their expectations at least that much.

No, it is the comparisons to people who are less talented yet objectively more successful that are truly disheartening.  At any level, there will be peers who have opted out of the mindful path and accepted a predictable linear course – the engineer who accepted the cushy soul-crushing corporate job, or the artist who started shucking formulaic garbage to a captive audience, or the entrepreneur who built a disruption-resistant moat around his one big idea.  They will be steadily accumulating tangible rewards while you are struggling for each sub-linear advancement.

Of course, if you persist in your dedication to thrust work, you will eventually surpass your linear counterparts.  Over the long haul you will end up in a different class.  But with each episodic jump you will be comparing yourself to (and steadily falling behind) a new cohort of peers.

The NFL rookie quarterback who invests a year on the bench adapting to the speed and complexity of the pro game, finds little solace in comparisons to all the guys who went undrafted.  Instead he grates at the comparison to the guy who was picked late in the draft yet still managed to jump right onto the field running a dumbed-down offense.

As Venkat notes:

Performance quality is something you measure differently as skill levels increase.

Once you graduate from a given episode your notions of success evolve.  Comparing yourself to a prior cohort of peers offers little consolation.  The only consolation available is the knowledge that there is no going back.  I will second Venkat’s assertion:

 Being without a thrust-engine is horrible. The periods of my life when I lacked one are the worst ones I remember.

Once you’ve had a taste, no extrinsic reward can offer a viable substitute.

 

photo courtesy of Eole