♪ Oralization ♪The rules of honesty at this station.
I recently found an interesting phenomenon.
We often overestimate what we can do in one day and underestimate what we can do in 10 days. We often overestimate what we can do in one month and underestimate what we can do in 10 months. We often overestimate what we can do in a year and underestimate what we can do in a decade.
I’ll call it.”Ten laws.”。
Here the “I” and the “X” are not necessarily precise mathematical proportions. It’s more like a scale shift: when we look at a short cycle, we usually overestimate the willpower and speed of implementation; but when the time stretches to ten cycles, we underestimate the changes that result from continued accumulation, repeated correction and resilience.
Why do we overestimate a day?
Because when we plan a day, we think of a very clean path: sit down, start working, keep moving, and then finish.
But the real day isn’t. The real day has start-up costs, news and meetings, mission switching, incomplete information, back-to-work after mistakes, and energy and mood swings. When we draw up a plan, we are often calculated as “the best in the state”; the real plan is implemented by a volatile, disruptive and living person.
It is also easy to mistook “the amount of work that this matter simply requires” as “the amount of time it takes in the real world”. It may take three hours to write a programme, but it may span three days from checking the information, waiting for feedback, reversing the recurrence, and eventually producing a usable version.
That tendency is referred to in psychology as a “planning error”: we will stare at the ideal scenario before us, while ignoring how long it actually took in the past. We are not unaware of the friction in the world, but simply, at the moment of planning, routinely erase it.
Why should we underestimate ten years?
Because human imagination of the future is usually linear.
We will consciously think that I can only move forward this way one month, 10 months about 10 times, and that I can only do this this year, about 10 times this year.
But real long-term growth is not a simple addition. When you did your work in the tenth month, you used not the first month’s ability. You have better judgement, more skilled methods, more appropriate tools, more stable relationships, as well as work, systems, credibility and experience from the first nine months. The last investment was on the previous build-up.
Thus, there is often a compounding structure for long-term development:
Increased capacity to do things more quickly; to do more, with more feedback; to make judgements more accurate; and to make judgements more accurate and allow us to enter into better opportunities and relationships.
It’s not surprising to see any of the rings alone, but once they’re connected, the result is probably far beyond our original linear imagination.
There is also the reason that many valuable things have thresholds and lags. The first 10 articles may have been mainly written by learning, the first several projects by developing methodologies, the first few months of training by developing habits and the previous cooperation by building trust. Early investment appears to be of little return because much of the effort is spent on infrastructure. Once the threshold has been crossed, what has accumulated in the past will be concentrated.
It’s not an empty thought.
I then looked into it, and there were a lot of close observations.
The future scientist Roy Amara has put forward the famous “Amara Law”: people tend to overestimate the short-term effects of technology while underestimating the long-term effects of technology. As Bill Gates also said in the hierarchies of The Way Forward, people often overestimate the changes that will take place over the next two years, while underestimating the changes that will take place over the next decade.
Douglas Hofstadter’s version corresponds to the first half: “It’s always been longer than you expected, even if you’ve taken this law into account.” The psychological error of planning also provides ample empirical evidence for short-term overestimation.
There is another interesting research support for chronic underestimation, called “History Ending Perceptions”. While it was acknowledged that much had changed itself over the past decade, there was general agreement that it was now nearing the final version and that the same changes would not occur in the next decade. In estimating what we can do in 10 years, we often imagine “this is a decade for me to work today” rather than a decade for me to learn, change the environment, upgrade tools, build relationships.
So the Ten Laws doesn’t mean the numbers have some magical power. It is more like putting false planning, long-term compounding and human underestimation of future change into the same easy-to-remember expression.
Time alone doesn’t make miracles.
Of course, 10 days, 10 months or 10 years do not automatically lead to dramatic results.
If a person merely repeats the same mistake, time magnifies the error; if the direction is not right for a long time, ten years of adherence may be only deeper path dependence. What is truly capable of producing long-term dividends is not “during time”, but rather a system that is capable of continuous learning and correction.
The system requires at least a few things: continuous input, real feedback, retention of competencies and continuous reorientation based on results. The insistence without feedback is simply a repetition, the effort without retention begins from scratch each time, and the long-termism without correction may be only stubborn.
So I’d rather write the following ten laws:
People generally overestimate what they do with will in a short cycle, while underestimating what they do with systems, feedback and dividends in 10 consecutive cycles.
What does it do to me?
It reminds me of the need to be more restrained in the scheduling of today and bolder in the imagination of a decade.
For the day, don’t fill it up. Leave room for real friction, surprise and recovery and commit to only a few things that are really important. For 10 days, 10 months and 10 years, instead of simply replicating today’s capabilities, the question is: where would I end up if I built a system that would be sustainable, preserve results and absorb feedback?
Short-term plans should be conservative, because reality is full of friction; long-term direction can be bolder, because people, tools, relationships and systems grow.
Shortening the promise of a day and scaling up the direction of a decade. Underestimation of single sprints and overestimation of successive periods.