Long read: The Mathematical Reason Most People Never “Make It”

He invokes Price’s law named after the physicist, Derek J. de Solla Price:

“Price’s Law states that the square root of the number of people in a domain does 50% of the work.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

Of the 30 million businesses in the United States, about 5,500 (the square root) generate half the total economic output.

Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and a few thousand other companies produce as much as the other 29,994,500 combined.

In astrophysics, the square root of stars in a galaxy produce half the light. The Milky Way has roughly 100 billion stars, but 316,000 of them (0.0003%) generate half the luminosity.

Spotify has about 11 million artists, but 50% of all streams are generated by only 3,300 artists.

…In creative fields like YouTube, very few channels account for the vast majority of both views and ad revenue.

The list goes on and on. River systems, sales teams, Wikipedia editors, wealth distribution, anywhere you look, the square root does half the work.”

What explains this? It’s that good old compounding: “This is just how complex systems work when skill, consistency, opportunity, and luck all compound over time.”

The author shows how we can use this to our advantage by giving an example of his own work, which is writing: “In the last 8 months, I’ve posted about 30 newsletters, over 700 notes, and thousands of comments. In that time, only about 15 notes and 2 newsletters went “viral” and brought me an overwhelmingly large amount of my subscribers.

That’s 17 pieces out of 730+ total outputs—roughly 2.3%—driving the majority of my growth.

But I never would have found those 17 winners without posting the other 713.

If you’re creating content, √n of your posts will drive 50% of your results. If you publish 100 posts, 10 will matter.

If you publish 400, 20 will matter. The rest are essentially practice rounds.”

This could apply to any content creation as well. He then applies this to our skills:

“You have dozens of skills. √n of them drive half your value in the marketplace.

For me, that’s probably three skills: writing clearly, connecting disparate ideas, and asking uncomfortable questions in consulting sessions.

Everything else I do—project management, graphic design, coding—is table stakes or delegable.

The reason why we spend so much time trying to be “well-rounded” is because we’ve been lied to.

The education system, the corporate ladder, the self-help industrial complex—they all sell the idea of balanced competence. “Work on your weaknesses!”

No. Double down on your √n skills. Get so good at your two or three multiplier skills that you’re in the top 1% at the combination of those skills.”

And also in time management: “If you work 40 hours a week, about 6 of those hours actually matter. The other 34 are maintenance, “busywork,” meetings that could’ve been emails, and a whole lot of goofing around.”

Essentially, we need to do the work – lots of it but keep an eye on what’s working and double down on those: “In an ideal world, we would all know the best moves to make at any given time, but that’s not how the world works.

You can’t know which 10 posts out of 100 will blow up without posting all 100. You can’t know which skills are your multipliers without trying a bunch of skills. You can’t know which relationships matter without meeting a lot of people.

…So do the work. Publish the “bad” posts, take the “pointless” meetings, develop the “useless” skills. Because you really don’t know what’s useless until after the fact.

Compounding happens in the margins, in the weird micro-connections between the stuff that didn’t work and the stuff that did.”