Summary: Thinking about how you train is at least as important as the goals you set, and the convex returns on training should scare you into putting down that slice of pizza.

Body:

Hi Redpillers, I’m a long-time lurker on this subreddit and have been really impressed with the quality of the advice and the writing on the sub. As a bit of background, I’m in my early 20s and am one of the more productive PhD students out of my cohort in machine learning at a top-3 university. I’m also building an AI company on the side, so I hope this lends some credibility to what I write below.

Since I grew up without a real father figure, trp has been incredibly helpful for building a framework for making predictions about how women will behave and for optimizing my sexual strategy. Because you’ve all been so helpful, I thought I’d give back by sharing some things I’ve learned about common mistakes in decision-making that I see people (myself included!) make more often than they should.

The decisions you make every day define the impact you have on yourself and on other people and, at some level, the fundamental value of your life. This is trp, so I hope this isn’t too controversial. A very common decision-making framework is goal-setting, in which you write down goals for yourself and (try to) stick to them over time. Common examples of goals might be “X00k in yearly income in 5 years” or “5 plates by this time next year”. This is a pretty high-quality community, so I’m sure most people have tried some version of this in the past.

Goal-setting is a useful decision-making framework, but based on my experiences, the kind of day-to-day training you engage in plays a lot bigger role in the eventual outcome than the high-level goals that guided that training in the first place. In other words, instead of being determined by grandiose plans, excellence is fairly mundane. I borrowed this phrase from an excellent study, which I highly recommend to everyone here: https://archive.is/cqJzv. The study lines up exactly with my experiences and observations — apart from the few veritable geniuses I’ve met in my career, everyone in my field that made it this far put in years of high quality, consistent effort to get to where they are, and that consistent training was much more important for their eventual success than any sort of goals they set earlier in their lives.

What does this mean? It means that at the beginning of your self-improvement process, you should be more flexible with your goals, but forever inflexible with your training. To give some brief examples:

  • As part of training for your 5 plates goal (going out a ton, working out), you discover that you don’t actually want to spend so much time on these women; instead you’ll focus on getting 1-2 high quality plates and rebalancing your time elsewhere.
  • As part of your training to hit $500k in yearly income (researching market segments, quickly shipping MVPs, etc) you decide to pivot to a startup idea and your new goal is to grow the business. You might hit $500k, you might not — but your new goal is to operate a business as well as you possibly can and will realign your training with that goal.

This brings up my second point, which is that the opportunity cost of lost training should make you very careful about how you spend your time.

First, the return on training is convex — the value you get in exchange for the marginal unit of time spent getting on training for something increases as you get better.

What does this mean? In your head, extrapolate 8 hours per day of training out to 5 years in the future. Because the return is convex, most of the value you’ll get from this training is going to be realized starting 4 years down the road. So if you waste more than 20% of your time practicing now, you will realize at most half the total value that you could have realized. Of course, this is an extreme example and we’re assuming exponential growth (reality actually plateaus), but I hope you got the idea. This should be very scary to you; by making seemingly harmless decisions in the short term, you massively, permanently harm your long-term prospects.

  • To try this idea out, open up a Google spreadsheet and plug in a couple percentage growth numbers. See what happens when you get 1% better at something per week, compounded over 5 years.

Conclusions:

  • the kind of training you do is the #1 thing you should focus on when thinking about what outcomes you want for your life
  • the convex returns on training should be massive enough to move the needle on your short-term decision-making.