The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

I do. I have accomplished a lot of petty things (at risk of humble brag, which this is not) - decent lift numbers, few skills at competitive level, new things like GCP/AWS/Azure/K8S certs at work, etc. None of them are achievable through anything other than hours a days for months. Even things that seem basic like "do a handstand" or "drive a stick".

I also have friends who have accomplished petty things - none got results until they started sitting down with it for 3+ hours a day.

I will be more concrete - if you sit down to learn a language for 20 mins a day, it will fade before you get anywhere (without constant repetition, the amount of material for which builds up). If you workout, you need warm up, cool down, travel time, shower, nutrition - it can't be a micro-habit. Even if you WALK for fitness, that's 40 minutes right there. Coding? No one here is going to tell me you will learn all the search algos and such without sitting down for 40 minutes a day. Hell, it takes 40 minutes to do a difficult hackerrank/codewars problem that you don't really understand. Not talking FizzBuzz here.

A failed example? I spent an hour a day for several months learning ML. Passed that famous Andrew Ng Machine Learning course. Because I don't apply it, I barely remember anything other than a general understanding of the overall process.

edit: Another obvious example that comes to mind - working on cars. If you don't dedicate an hour to it, you won't even have the time to get your tools out. It takes something like a day to just change out calipers, pads, and rotors on all 4 wheels, and it's about as basic as it gets in terms of repairs, other than an oil change, which is maintenance.

> But this is your life. What can you do? What happens if you add one small, simple, positive action to the success side?

> Nothing you can see. What happens if you add one more? Nothing you can see

Having been on a journey to change the direction of my life for a few months now this perfectly sums up how I've been feeling about it.

I'm gonna give the book a read because I think it's what I need to hear right now. Thank you for making me aware of it.

I had a tool I worked on a little bit every day for over a decade and for a while it was pretty popular with a large following. Persistence is what got me from nowhere to somewhere, but after a while persistence offers a diminishing return.

Persistence is necessary to build something from nothing to establishment. That is more than just working. It means you have pushed through into something that works well enough that other people will use it and strongly recommend it.

That is the point where a trickle becomes a flood, but the flood analogy is a bad analogy. Actual flooding, with water, is an explosive phenomenon where a large area achieves maximum saturation in unison and so the trickle becomes a serious concern almost instantly. When all water over a large area has nowhere to go suddenly at the same time there is an immediate change like the flip of a switch.

Growth and adoption don't work like that. It takes time to build adoption. By the time a product reaches critical mass many early users may have already moved on. The very thing that made your product special or unique may be gone and you probably don't know it. This means the thing that cause adoption could be code while you are still building traffic because of a lag between network effects and incentives. That means adoption could be dying while you are building traffic and you won't know and until the future once traffic catches up and begins to decline at which point you are having to catch up.

If you are passionate enough, beyond mere persistence, you will figure the traffic/adoption cycle out to keep forward momentum, but only if you are properly incentivized. It takes tremendous effort to reach a large critical mass, especially for a small team (in my case a single developer). To want to pivot past your personal motivates to keep your product alive takes something more, something different. Persistence won't buy you that.

I intended to say "This is not one of those times that this adage applies."

Isn't there some chinese 4 character saying about water cutting stone?