Non linear thinking
This is going to be quite a small story compared to my previous ones. I believe consistency is key to any progress, however small it be. I am finding it absolutely impossible to come up with a topic to write about after the day I had today but let me just put a topic down first and then hope the words flow somehow.
Non linear thinking is something I have given quite a bit of thought about. Humans are not built to think in a non linear fashion. You might have read from multiple sources regarding this in the context of investments or compounding and so on. But I think that still gives a very small sample set of what non linear thinking is about.
Simply put, nonlinearity is when there is no direct relationship between an independent variable and a dependent variable. But it does not mean that there is definitely a continuous curve that will define the variables. For example, it could be a discontinuous one like a step function, an overlapping one or even a cyclical one. When we understand that something is not the case, we automatically tend to imply and interpret that something else is the case when we have no idea how many such cases exist.
Most decisions that matter in life end up being non-linear in nature. So, its very important to understand if the decision you are considering has the potential for a non-linear outcome. And by corollary, you cannot expect non-linear outcomes in your life/career by taking linear actions.
This is where I personally see multiple people end up failing to grasp the non- linear thinking. An example of a non-linear outcome could be retiring say by the age of 35. You can never achieve this by taking the linear decision of working for a salary and hoping to save as much as possible to have a corpus that sustains you for 50+ years.
The only way this is doable is by taking a non-linear decision of either starting up yourself or joining a startup at an early enough stage where there is potentially no upper cap on the returns on your investment, which is your time (returns being the value of your ESOP).
And this is the same case while building a product as well. There was a tweet by a well known founder recently that ‘A-B testing never changed the world’. I think the intent of the statement was thought out very well even though it was dramatized extremely to prove a point. Creating value for customers happens mostly in discontinuous steps (new technology such as internet, mobile, cloud) or in an exponential way (social media network effects) but almost never in a linear fashion. I do not think this demeans linear growth in any way but just that there are some places which requires non linear thinking and some linear thinking makes even more sense.
