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Hey Rhys’ Pieces! (That’s you, the readers of my newsletter.)
The 7th cohort of the Roote Fellowship begins October 2. If you’re looking to accelerate yourself or know a young frontier person who is, please apply here by Monday, September 25th. There are 30+ great folks in RF7—join them!
Before each cohort I improve the curriculum, like a (real) teacher does before a new school year. In this cohort, I’ve focused on a new framing—“sparking success spirals”—which I’ll explain below. But before that, a few housekeeping notes:
I'm starting OpenHouse 🏡, a warm communal house in SF! We’re looking for curious, sharp, playful, and humble folks to co-create it with. ❤️🤓 More details here. Please apply or send it to your friends who might be interested.
I haven’t been blogging recently because I’m heads down on my book, How Patterns Emerge. On page 400 now. Excited to share more next year.
If you like the piece on success spirals below, also check out these new pieces of RF7 content: How To Build Self-Awareness, How to Relate to Others, and The Speedrunner’s Canon.
Thanks!
Sparking Your Success Spiral
Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel. — Socrates
Compounding is everything.
Compound interest dominates financial markets, compounding network effects dominate business, and compounding yourself dominates all other self-work you can do.
So how do you compound yourself?
We know what compounding looks like—an exponential curve in the red line below:
But what is it? Compounding yourself is best understood as a success spiral, which is a feedback loop where success begets success:
In a success spiral:
Competence begets confidence
Momentum begets motivation
Curiosity begets learning
Once a success spiral starts, your spiral expands and you can tackle larger and larger problems with confidence:
Anyone who has done anything started with a success spiral.
Arnold Schwarzenegger won his first bodybuilding trophy, then won hundreds more. I coded my first TI-83 calculator game in high school, then studied computer science in college. (I'm just as impressive as Arnold, I know.)
Startups like AirBnB, Ethereum, and YIMBY are 10-year overnight successes. Behind their victory is a decade-long grind. Behind the grind is a kernel of belief.
Success spirals are quite powerful, so let's understand them. First, how to start them. Second, how to judge their health. Third, how to magnify their impact.
I. Starting a success spiral
The main way to start a spiral is by celebrating small wins.
Note that I said "small" wins. Why? There's a cold start problem here. How can you believe in yourself if you haven't done anything? How can you be confident if you aren't already competent, have motivation without existing momentum, and curiosity without a life full of learning?
You need to manufacture belief. You do this by celebrating small wins:
Start by celebrating process goals, like learning a new email or coding hotkey.
Then transition to outcome goals, like celebrating a demo you shipped or an article you published.
At the end of every week, reflect on your success, be grateful, and create more of it.
To spark a success spiral, you need to meme it into existence.
Once you've started a success spiral, you need to continue it. Spirals only work when they're repeated. Build good habits. Write weekly. Read a few books every month. Use Anki. Exercise. Sleep. Go to therapy.
In 30 years, you'll look back in awe of what you've accomplished.
II. Judging the health of your spiral
There are three ways to judge the health of your spiral: 1) Do you believe in yourself? 2) Are you learning? 3) Is it fun?
First, and most importantly, success spirals come from believing in yourself. Do you believe? Are you proud of what you're doing? Do you have self-efficacy, self-esteem, and an internal locus of control? If not, celebrate small wins and become aware of negative self-talk. You get to choose whether to believe in yourself. Choose to believe!
Besides belief, the second best metric to judge the health of your spiral is your rate of learning. Are you being a sponge, drinking from the information firehose? If not, surround yourself with sharper & more ambitious people & ideas. Are you spending time and money on books, coaches, and lessons? If not, start working on yourself, like sculpting a piece of clay. Bet on yourself—$1,000 today will be worth $10,000 in a year. (Here are some tools for learning that have worked for me.)
Third, and finally, make sure your success spiral is pointed in the right direction. Don't put good effort toward a bad goal. Like the great pyramids, success spirals are only recognized after decades but are built minute-by-minute. You take thousands of actions per day that add up: reading, writing, coding, facilitating, listening. Because spirals are built from lots of micro actions, any amount of friction will build up.
Check in with yourself to ensure you're on the right path. Are you aligned with your Ikigai? Are you doing what comes easily to you? Are you following your relief? Are you doing what others see as your strengths? Are you excited? Are you having fun?
It's hard to continue a success spiral when you don't want to succeed at that thing. If you're unsure what to work on, spend more time learning about yourself and the world, then double down on a direction. Search for low friction, then simplify simplify simplify.
III. Increase your leverage
Once you have a great success spiral, look to magnify it through leverage.
Leverage is a multiplier that takes a unit of goodness and spreads it as widely as possible. If success spirals are finding a good thing, leverage is scaling it.
As Sam Altman notes: "there are many ways to get leverage, such as capital, technology, brand, network effects, and managing people." Leverage comes by productizing your strengths, creating impact while you're asleep.
You'll know you're ready for leverage once you feel comfortable but unsatisfied. When you’re in a healthy success spiral, but want more. At the beginning of your career, each unit of your time should build more and more belief. But by the middle, each unit of time should generate more and more impact.
With a spiral, success begets success. With leverage, each success begets larger success.
To summarize:
Dents in the universe are the result of leveraged success spirals that come from kernels of belief, sparked by small wins.
To start: Celebrate small wins, believe in yourself, follow your energy, and increase your leverage. Then, at the end of life, you'll look back without regrets.
-Rhys ❤️
To spark your success spiral, learn more and apply to the Roote Fellowship here.
❤️ This work is supported by excellent patrons and organizations. ❤️
If you’d like to become a patron to help us map & build the frontier, please do so here or pledge below. Thanks!
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