Give people at least some grace. If they know they’ve screwed up, and are reaping consequences for it, there’s no need to keep reminding them, since they have to live with those consequences even after they’ve learned their lesson.
Except for the people who entertain us, we tend to imagine ourselves as less capable than we really are. This means there’s always untapped potential within everyone except professional entertainers.
Usually, throughout history, the strongest ruled, either through keeping their strength or taking it from others. In a free society, though, the most popular rule, often by taking advantage of what they have to have the best-looking appearance of efficiency, morality, or quality. In that sense, equality is always impossible without removing consequences. Leftism claims that it can remove consequences and retain purpose.
How a culture acquired its wealth determines how well it empowers its creators more than how much wealth it has.
Everyone is only as responsible for their results to the degree they haven’t learned better from it.
While adequacy is statistically normal, unusually successful people do a few things to compensate:
- Expect that everything will go wrong, and become freakishly good at what they can control to compensate.
- Self-educate about where unknown aspects can come from, and plan ahead for them.
- Predict the small margins that can magnify their work the most. Those infinitesimally small margins in pretty much any field, over time, create an exponential return.
To succeed at anything, seek places you can apply an incrementally stronger compounding effect, whether it’s in wealth, relationships, career, or whatever.
People tend to credit successes to themselves, and failures to their environment. Attributing failures to oneself requires humility, but pays well in succeeding, and attributing successes to others is often a meaningful experience in itself.
Diminishing return means that simple decisions are easier to make. Whenever possible, aim for minimalism to magnify your purposes.
Creative works can be timeless, but creators have a shelf life. The spotlight is power, and power corrupts. Or, we age beyond being able to think creatively anymore.
One fascinating element of diminishing return arises in how we understand. We can frequently become profoundly good at performing or growing in understanding, even when a core component of how we understand is entirely wrong. By shifting our ideas (which can be as simple as merely changing beliefs about one sentence) we can remove many limits by non-understanding something that was wrong.
Artists are hypersensitive to the responses to their creative works because they’ve poured their hearts into it. The rest of the world must give artists more grace, and artists must learn to emotionally detach from what they create after they’re finished with it.
Fan theories and hacks, while often hilarious, are brilliant ways the public answers clear story and engineering failures the original creator could never have considered. These theories show the consumers have been so affected by the creative work that they decide to produce for themselves.
Unless a content creator has an alternative form of income, they’ll eventually cash in and sell out. This will frequently include affiliate marketing, selling lower-quality offerings, and a general deterioration in quality.