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Ask HN: Peter Theil Power laws for individual

by raxrb on 1/27/23, 6:02 AM with 3 comments

Peter theil in his book Zero to One, mentions about power law. He says that some industries, some GTM etc are going to provide very high returns compared to others and we as an individual should think really hard to answer such questions. It's a very philosophical task. How are you following it?
  • by themodelplumber on 1/27/23, 6:34 AM

    It's fun to think about IMO.

    In studying different models of personality, one comes across a similar phenomenon where an individual tends to naturally close in on some smaller set of capacities that they can/do lean on to do huge amounts of work.

    You can call it "having a specific personality" in that it's a center of gifts, reliable energy activities for that individual, etc. but it's not usually fully conscious and you need to study a lot to identify and develop this. Power law principles really obviously apply. You can really push yourself here. Most people don't realize how much and how to push without becoming a workaholic.

    What I did then, personally, was to identify these centers in myself and then attempt to change all of my work focus to rely more on those capacities.

    As it turns out I had already started to do the exact reverse of that around quarter-life, which is common as a resting/recovering function that is very easily interpreted as "new career mission".

    So I backed out of that a bit, used the recovery centers for recovery purposes, and maneuvered more in the direction of reliable, natural leverage.

    This was in a way very difficult because like many of us, I wasn't raised in an environment where this was taught or even thought to be healthy. So even my inner voice was extremely pessimistic.

    (But I was also used to this from coaching groups and corporate teams. You can tell a tiger it's a tiger, but if it's already learned to scratch out its name on paper, maybe it really wants to hear that it's a master calligrapher.)

    So there were many difficulties, but overall it's worked really well so far.

    (I am not completely sure if this answers your question but I want to think I understood what you were getting at :-))