Eric Siu explains why extreme success requires disproportionate effort. He uses Olympic racing to show how tiny improvements at the top level create exponential payoffs, even though the absolute work gains diminish as you climb higher.
What's interesting is that like if you work 100 times harder, you can sometimes get like a million times the payout. And so like the top end of work still has disproportionate payoffs. And so like there are diminishing returns, but there's a point where you actually get like outsized returns for the effort because like if you think about it from like an Olympic racing perspective, like if I work, you know, 10 times more than everybody else does, but I get gold and the next guy gets silver, the difference between gold and silver in running is everything, even though it's a 10th of a second. Right. And so from an absolute perspective, there's diminishing returns. But from a relative perspective, I think you have exponential returns from being the best.
