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it’s late and i’m tired …

centaur 0

…but I’m still going to try to get at least one thing done before I go to bed.

Because, even though it’s been a rough few years, and sometimes I want to give up …

I still believe you just need to work slightly harder than you want to in order to really get things done, and if you do, you’ll often find that your efforts are more greatly rewarded than you might have imagined.

I’ll go further: if you work just a little bit less than you need to, it’s often a net negative: you expend effort without reaching the goal, so all you’re left with is the cost. But if you put that slight extra effort in, right when you think you want to give up, that’s when everything can flip from negative to positive.

We often think in terms of a simple linear model of effort to results – we do a little work to get a little reward, and we’re often taught in economics class that there’s a law of diminishing returns, so if we do even more work, we get proportionally less reward.

But that little bit of extra effort right when you want to give up flips that script: it doesn’t give you a little bit of extra reward, approaching zero the more effort you put in; because it can turn a loss into a win, it effectively has an almost infinite relative payoff.

So: Don’t give up. Because, when you feel you want to … that’s when you’re close to victory.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Pound cake, deep learning, and art practice.

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