Trajectory

Personal growth, production, and consumption are the result of the choices you make multiplied by how often you make them on average.

If you read about 10 pages in any given reading session and in any given year you choose to read about 10 times, then you can expect to have read about 100 pages within the next 365 days.

You can invert this logic and apply it to all the days you don’t read as well: 10 pages * 355 days = 3550 pages of knowledge, in a sense, left on the table.

Because personal gains and losses are marginal when measured on a daily basis, it’s easy to brush off the choices you make or don’t make today as negligible.

Consider exercise and physical fitness by analogy — the gains from one exercise session are nearly imperceptible. The same is true for losses when you skip an exercise session.

It’s only in the macro — over a period of dozens of sessions or skipped sessions — that your progress or lack of it becomes apparent.

As you’re evaluating your decisions, don’t just think about the immediate impact.

Try using this question to help you identify which decisions are in your best interest: “what if I made this same decision every day for the next year? Is Future Me going to be disappointed or proud?”