The New Year, The Exponents, and the Superluminal returns
New Year, New Chariot
This post is based on a journal entry I wrote to myself on 1/2/2025 thinking about goals for the New Year. It was directly inspired by the wonderful advice that Friend-of-Phaethon Chad Morris gave me concerning how to set goals that orient you best towards success in contrast to the often impossibly ambitious goals people, myself extremely included, tend to set during New Years. The journal entry was quite rambling, but halfway through it, I found myself writing as if it were for a Flight of Phaethon audience, so I figured I’d share it. It’s been lightly edited since then, but it still has a somewhat similar style to how I would write in a journal entry just for myself. Either way, I like it, and I hope you do too.
Chad's advice was really good. I want to set goals for myself that actually constitute living well. Most goals, when one is in a goal-setting mood, are so ambitious as to be achievable only if one ruins one's life in doing them. And historically, I LOVE those kinds of goals. I'm addicted to them, and this year I am going to try to stop setting them. A good goal is one that you would be happy to achieve while living the rest of your life. A decent heuristic is like: if you worked 10% less hard on this goal than you have been able to sustainably achieve for 6 months, what is a reasonable outcome?
For instance, many people want to set fitness goals when coming into the New Year. I do too. When I was at UChicago, getting a lot of exercise was very easy for me because I was on the tennis team and we practiced fairly hard 5 days per week. Now that I'm out on my own in the real world, that kind of activity doesn't happen automatically, but I still love playing tennis, and I still want to be in good shape. Over the past six months since I graduated, I managed to find a way to lock myself into playing at least two days per week, and it's not been so hard to play three. As a result, my goal for the next few months is to average playing more than 3 days/week—even if it's 3.1 days/week. That is totally doable with a reasonable amount of effort, and I would be better off if I achieved it.
Or, to be more personal, let me think about some goals regarding writing. As much as I've been writing on (this) Substack and "self-publishing," I think there's a lot of value to be gained in polishing my writing sufficiently to publish through the medium of the Ayn Rand Institute [1]. I'm quite happy with what I publish here—especially given how little editing goes into it—and especially since 6 months ago I was not publishing anything at all. However, I think some of the ideas from my posts here, and indeed some of the literal posts themselves, could become fuller, more substantive, polished works—and at least for now, I don’t have the skills to get there all on my own, and ARI can help me. I've never completed the editorial process at ARI before, but I'm confident that—if I just put in some honest, non-exceptional effort—I could complete it at least once within the next six months.
Again, since I'm publishing here almost every day, one article in six months might seem like a super lame goal, but there's no credit for making the most accurate goal. You only get goal-setting credit if you make the most “orientable” goal (this is a little bit of a confusing formulation, but I decided to keep it). If your goal points you to a better life, then it’s a good one. If not, then it sucks. If I end up publishing far more, then that could be amazing, but setting myself the goal of publishing (e.g.,) 6 articles in 6 months would be silly given that I (a) don't know in all of its details what is involved and (b) don't even know if I will want to publish another article after the first one—and certainly not at what pace I will want to publish them. However, I do know that if I work in a sustained way, and account for reasonable delays due to the editorial process, I can be confident that one article before ~May (when my contract expires :P) is extremely doable without upending the other facets of my life that I want to go well.
Ok, I’m going to psychologize myself a little bit here. Like I said at the outset, I have been historically addicted to goals that constitute a far greater demand on myself than I could reasonably sustain. The reason, I think, comes out of dedication to a part of myself that I hold extremely dear: I romanticize extreme achievement. Magnificent gains in ability, in knowledge, in wealth are part of what's possible to people--even ordinary people. That fact about humanity is so special, so magical, that I love it in others and want more than anything for it to be part of my life too.
And the thing is: it’s possible. The jaw-dropping feats of an Einstein or a Rockefeller (who are both rags-to-riches stories but with different forms of "wealth") are just exceptional versions of a capacity that almost every human has—to radically transform himself for the better. In this newsletter, and in my life, I idolize and romanticize those extreme growers, but just as importantly I romanticize that process. The thing that human beings can do where they go from ignorance to knowledge, from rags to riches, from mediocrity to ability, is the thing I love most about our species.
From the perspective of goal-setting then, extreme growth is something I want to be part of my life, so there’s this temptation to demand of myself extreme growth. Only that doesn’t really work in practice. Often, legislating extreme growth directly undercuts it. And I think I’ve got an interesting perspective on why. I think a key to understanding extreme growth is understanding compound interest. I think the underlying math of extreme growth and compound interest are probably the same.
It's a pretty commonly understood financial fact that if you start investing even modest amounts in your youth, then at a growth rate of ~7% per year (or whatever it really is), one can be rather wealthy by the time one reaches middle age or retirement. If you run the number, it's shocking and almost miraculous how much money you can earn if you just compound.
One thing that makes me more convinced that this is true is that human beings are notoriously bad at understanding exponential trends. The entire reason Microsoft is a business is because Bill Gates was the only guy in the 1970s who understood most clearly what the exponential trend in Moore's Law meant for computers. Similarly, Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in large part because he uniquely saw and understood the exponential growth curve in internet usage. For whatever reason, it takes an outlier mind to really grapple with exponential curves. [2]
Extreme growth for human beings is not a vertical line upward, it is an exponential curve, compounding over and over again. The better one is, the more skills one has, the more effective an honest, hard day's work will become. The more one knows the more questions one can grapple with and get answers to. The more resources one has, the more successful ventures one can create. Ability, knowledge, and wealth all follow these exponential trends--and that's probably why it's so hard for us to replicate. Whatever the reason that it's hard to understand the implications of exponential trends anywhere is probably the reason they're hard to understand when they’re about us.
But if you take seriously that growth is an exponential trend, it has huge implications for how you view your past and your future, and hence how you view goal-setting.
If honest, non-self-sabotaging effort at growth creates an exponential trend, then your life will always feel like it could be way better--because if the exponential curve continues, it's about to be! When you stand on an exponential curve, if you look backward, it seems flat, and if you look forward, it appears vertical. That's a hard thing to deal with. The fact that you didn't grow as fast last year as you will this year doesn't constitute a failure on your part--rather the ability to grow so fast next year is a testament to your work in this one. And conversely, the fact that your entire past looks “flat” doesn't mean it is. If you’ve been putting in an honest effort and are committed to learning and improving, you’re just riding an exponential.
Also, if growth is exponential, then you'll only look superhuman in hindsight. Every day and every year will look like an honest, thoughtful effort at growing, improving, and executing. The superluminal returns come after a bunch of rounds of compounding. What that means is that when you set goals, you should set them keeping in mind that what you're aiming at is the next round of compounding, not trying to cram all of your future compounded gains into one cycle.
So for my New Year goals, my standards are going to be a lot different than they have in past years. I'm going to try to focus on the next round of compounding--things that I know I can do with honest effort. Then, with any luck, a few cycles later, I'll be able to look back and feel superhuman.
Have a wonderful new year.
Marek Michulka
Notes:
[1] My employer, whose content, including mine if I achieve my publishing goals, can be found here.
[2] This is such a disorganized set of thoughts that I’m not sure where to put this point, so it shall go here! The way that people almost inescapably go wrong when trying to think about exponential curves has a very characteristic nature to it too. It’s a chronic overestimation of the short-term and an underestimation of the long-term. Technology trends are not get-rich-quick schemes in the same way that New Year's resolutions shouldn’t be get-fit-quick schemes. Human growth is an exponential curve and so almost all of the value you have to gain is ahead of you.
This is an obligatory note to thank Gena Gorlin for influencing this post also. I’m almost certain that this post constituted my rediscovery of ideas she has been trying to get me to understand for years. The problem is, I just don’t know which ones to attribute to her! So consider this a catch-all attribution for general psychological advice that may or may not be of her doing within this post.
Thanks for reading all this way. Since this post is a little different in style than normal, I would especially appreciate it if you were to let me know—either by replying to this email or in a comment—whether this was a uniquely good post, a uniquely bad one, or a uniquely average one. Is an open journal entry a good style or good content? New year, new chariot. Anything can happen if it turns out you guys like it!
Beyond reaching out, one of the few measurable ways I can tell the extent of your affection for these posts is if you shared them. Obviously that means you need to have someone in mind to send it to, so don’t worry about it. But if there is someone you can think of who might like this kind of thing, maybe let them know!