Time, difficulty, obscurity, and progressive dependency

I like this as an encouragement to do things. Everyone thinks that the way they see the world is "obvious" but it's very much dependent on everything from your genetics through to your experience and interests.

First and foremost, people have lives. They only have so much time they can give a project, and the more time a project takes up, the more likely they’ll either decide not to take it on, or that they’ll run out of time and not come back to it later.

The same goes for difficulty. While I wouldn’t say that people, by their nature, are lazy, I would say that evolution has favored this behavioral pattern where people tend to be less likely to do things that are more difficult, or involve a greater number of steps. As a result, the greater the degree of difficulty an endeavor requires, or the greater the number of steps, the less likely that someone has done it, or that they’ve finished after starting.

Next, obscurity. I don’t think it should come as much of a surprise that the more obscure the thing that you’re thinking of doing, the lower the likelihood that someone has stumbled on it and done it.

Finally, there seems to be this fourth factor combining obscurity and the number of steps in cases of progressive dependency, where later steps require previous steps to be completed to even be discovered. Say one in 10 people in your industry will stumble on whatever idea you happen to have first. Then maybe one in 10 people who complete the step following the first idea will discover the second idea, and then one in 10 of those who complete the second will also discover the third. It stands to reason that the more steps your project requires, the less likely it is that someone else will have stumbled on all of them.

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Source: talglobus.com
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Collection: finds-au723pdfugg

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