11:59 PM

Like most people in India shortly after independence, my grandfather grew up poor enough that he could not afford footwear or new clothes. He lived in a house with a leaky roof that would muddy up the floor. When I asked him about the plumbing infrastructure in his hometown, he'd wince, laugh and spare me the horror of the imagery of the old gutters.

In his twenties, he was a worker in a sugarcane factory. In his thirties, he worked for a bank. In his forties, he was CEO of one of the oldest private education institutions in Pune.

Ironically, he made the most wealth in his life when he least needed it—a decade into his retirement.

My grandfather has admirable qualities which definitely contributed to his rise in wealth and status. Yet, it's easy to overlook what was most effective here—compounding effects. This is perhaps why his net worth peaked long after he stopped drawing a full salary.

It's not just his index funds that have compounded over time to get him up the ladder of society. It's also other, more intangible "stocks" like

• Education
• People skills (street smartness)
• Networks and connections

The dividends from these stocks feed into each other over time—they are cross-reinforcing feedback loops.

A reinforcing feedback loop compounding a "stock" has an unfortunate property of peaking late. The classic "bacteria doubling in a jar" riddle exemplifies this.

Say we have one bacterium in a jar at 11:00 PM, whose population doubles every minute. Assuming that our jar is fully saturated with bacteria by midnight, at what time might it be half-full?

11:59 PM.

This answer is not immediately intuitive. Digging more: at around 11:55 PM, the jar is only 3% full, and at 11:50 PM it's 0.1% full. If you were quite invested in growing this bacterial culture, you'd be in despair. The jar is lacking precious germs—almost negligible amounts, right until the last couple of minutes. You might even bail out, assuming this doubling business is wasteful.

My grandfather perhaps might have felt similarly when he was building his skills as he toiled at the sugarcane factory. But he persisted, mostly due to his value systems that placed a high status for honest, persistent hard work.

Perseverance is often presented as this hard-edged gritty thing, with little explanation for why it works. It also gets a bad reputation when it doesn't work. My understanding for why it's useful and why it works is due to the compounding of a stock—a stock being anything that can accumulate.

If your persistence is towards a process that compounds a stock such as your skills, knowledge, muscles or blog posts, it is extremely rewarding. The persistence is necessary because the rewards come quite late, after having seen almost nothing for a long time, much like the bacteria in the jar. But perseverance can indeed be wasted. I call this chump perseverance, i.e., persistence that is wasted on something like a day job where said chump is increasing shareholder value, while not being a holder of said shares. If you find yourself gainfully employed, make sure that you have stocks to build that you own—your skills and your network.

I've found myself auditing what stocks are out there, along with the reinforcing loops that feed it. Doing this would make my assignment clear—persevere until the "late peak".

A few inferences fall out of this line of thinking. I need to pick a stock that reliably compounds—index funds are a classic example—it has almost always shown +x% annual growth over long periods of time. With other kinds of stocks, I can hit a wall pretty fast.

Self help gurus like to promote the idea that if you improve by 1% every day, you'd be 1.01³⁶⁵ ≈ 37.8 times better by the end of the year. But we underestimate how hard it is to improve by even 1% when you are already great at something—if Usain Bolt improved his 2008 Beijing Olympic world record lap time by 1% every day for a year, he would have broken the sound barrier in Berlin 2009. Obviously, that did not happen.

Luckily, I am not Bolt-level elite at most things, which gives me plenty of headroom to climb up the S-curve. Once I hit a wall there, there's always plenty of new stocks that we could invest in afterwards.

Another inference is that the reinforcing loop should be simple enough to reinforce. Some find it easy to go lift weights every day—necessary even. This is a loop that straightforwardly reinforces a useful stock, which in this case is muscle and longevity. For others, it may be easy to read lots of books to build up their "knowledge" stock. While the ease of reinforcing these stocks will differ from person to person, what needs to be done is simple and well-defined.

There are some magical stocks that would almost never hit saturation for most people. Capital is a boring one. Reputation is another—it's easier to improve existing reputation the more of it you already have.

A stock I have a bit of experience with is the corpus of public work. This is mostly writing, and sometimes code. This is my 49th post on this website. If you include all the writing I've ever published online, it might be roughly double of what's on this site^[1]. It hasn't been much harder to write this blog post than it has been to write my first—quite the opposite. Yet, it really does feel like there's always room for an x% improvement over time. My writing and public corpus has played a role in scoring my current livelihood and getting in touch with some interesting people. It still feels like I'm nowhere near the "late peak". But it also doesn't matter because I enjoy building this corpus. Perseverance is pretty easy for me when it comes to writing.

On more reflection, I have arrived at more appealing stocks. These ones seem particularly underrated:

• Metacognition, skill acquisition, or, "learning how to learn". This one is great mostly because it makes it easier to acquire all the skill-based stocks that you will ever need. Given how fast the world is changing these days and how much information there is to sort and process, this becomes invaluable. I suspect there's a wall here, but most people aren't anywhere near it.
• Mental models and "systems thinking". There's compounding value in being able to reframe and process new information in terms of existing abstractions and structures that aid understanding. You may consider this very essay to be an application of a bunch of mental models that I have accumulated over the last few years.
• Mindfulness^[2]. This is a severely underrated stock, even when everyone talks about mindfulness all the time. Few actually really try it. Of all the skills I've made progress on in my whole life, nothing has come remotely close to the returns I've got from mindfulness. It's also absurdly easy to reinforce—all you need to do is be here, right now. This has also been the most robust defence against modern-era infinite slop feeds.

A fulfilling life is perhaps one that looks like bountiful web of stocks with reinforcing loops—some loop unto itself, and some feed into each other, as it did for my grandfather's triad of reputation, network and skills.

I see a lot of people around me who are often anxious, often feeling like they aren't doing enough, always chasing something and flitting about nervously, yet somehow stuck.

Why haven't you grown already? Why haven't you become a high achiever already? Where is your impact on this world? Modernity encourages this anxious thinking, and I sometimes feel this push sometimes as well. But I always remember the jar of bacteria. Believe in a good stock, and hold on to it. Enjoy reinforcing it. The bounty will come, and even if it doesn't, I've had a great time.

1. If I include the posts that I've ever written but never published, I'd guess that would be around 200 drafts.
2. Here, mindfulness refers to all sorts of contemplative practices and experiments that help you understand the mechanics of your consciousness—not just the breathe-and-focus stuff.