The Power Law Ruined My Peace of Mind

Have you ever heard of the power law?

If you haven't, consider yourself lucky. Once you understand it, you may never have peace of mind again.

Once you see it, there's a little flame inside you.

Sometimes it barely flickers. Sometimes it burns brighter.

But it never really goes away. It just sits there, nagging at the back of your mind.

Because once you realize that a handful of outcomes can matter more than everything else combined, it's hard to look at your career, your time, or your choices the same way again.

If you don't want that feeling, stop here.

Don't read the rest.

If you already know what I'm talking about, it's too late for you anyway.

So stick with me for a few minutes.

A decent job. A decent paycheck. A decent life.

Most of us aren't miserable.

That's what makes this complicated.

When you make enough to buy a house, travel once in a while, go out for dinner, own the latest phone and TV, and maybe even drive a nice car, it becomes surprisingly hard to imagine what "more" is supposed to look like.

Especially when getting this far already took a tremendous amount of effort.

Studying. Working. Saving. Then studying a little more, working a little more, saving a little more.

Over and over again.

And to be clear, by "more" I don't mean more stuff.

I don't mean a bigger house, a more expensive car, or another upgrade I don't really need.

I mean more freedom. More control over my time.

The kind of "more" that can buy back the hours I'm selling today.

More time with the people I love. More freedom to walk away from a job without fear. More room to take care of myself, have fun, and work on things that actually matter.

That's the kind of "more" I'm after: not more consumption, but more life for less time sold.

And that's where the problem begins.

If I want more of that, the conventional formula still seems to be the same: work harder. Study more. Earn more. Save more.

But at some point, that equation stops making sense.

Because somewhere along the way, I realized I was trading away the very thing I was trying to get back: time.

That's the trap: if every step forward requires more of your time, eventually you run out of time to give.

But what if better outcomes didn't always require proportionally more effort?

What if there were a way to pursue enormous upside while keeping the downside small?

What if you could run small experiments knowing that most of them wouldn't work, while keeping the cost of each failure limited?

If one of them succeeds, the outcome could be disproportionately large.

You wouldn't need to be right very often.

You might only need to be right once.

The idea I couldn't unsee

I didn't come up with any of this on my own.

Like many dangerous ideas on the internet, this one started with a YouTube video.

I was watching a Veritasium video about power laws when I first came across the idea.

If you've watched the video, you probably already get the idea. But here's the part that stuck with me.

In a normal distribution, most outcomes cluster around the average. Extreme results exist, but they become increasingly rare.

Power-law distributions look very different.

A huge number of outcomes can be small, while a tiny number become so large that they dominate everything else.

The many get little. The few get a lot.

Sometimes, an absurd amount.

You can find patterns like this in surprisingly different places: the size of cities, scientific citations, website traffic, wealth, and parts of financial markets.

And then there's the internet.

Think about YouTube.

Millions of videos are published, and most of them will never get much attention. Some will get thousands of views. A much smaller number will get millions — sometimes hundreds of millions.

And the relationship between effort and outcome can be wildly disproportionate.

Two people can spend roughly the same amount of time making a video and get completely different results. One might reach a few hundred people. Another might take off, get shared, recommended, talked about, and suddenly reach millions.

Success can create more opportunities for success.

More views can lead to more sharing. More sharing can lead to more views. Attention can attract even more attention.

And this is the part that changed the way I think about work.

Publishing a YouTube video is relatively cheap. Almost anyone can do it.

Yet the possible outcome is enormous.

You can spend a few hours making something that goes nowhere.

Or those same few hours can create something that reaches millions of people.

The effort is bounded.

The upside isn't.

And YouTube is just one example.

The question that started bothering me was:

What if I deliberately spent more of my time doing things with that kind of asymmetry?

Not gambling. Not risking everything on one attempt.

Quite the opposite.

Building small things. Publishing them. Testing ideas. Keeping the cost of failure low. And doing it again.

Most of them may go nowhere.

That's fine.

The goal is to keep exposing myself to domains where one unexpected success can matter far more than all the failures that came before it.

At this point, you might be thinking: "I already do that. I play the lottery every week."

Not quite.

When you buy a lottery ticket and lose, you get nothing. Next week, you buy another ticket and your odds are exactly the same.

You're back where you started.

But that's not what I'm talking about.

When one of my experiments fails, I want to keep something from it.

Maybe I learned how to build something faster. Maybe I understand a problem better. Maybe I discovered what people don't want. Maybe I wrote code I can reuse, found a better way to distribute a product, or reached a few people who might follow whatever I build next.

The experiment may have failed, but I didn't return to zero.

The next one starts with everything I learned from the last one.

That's the difference.

A lottery ticket disappears when it loses. A good experiment leaves something behind.

I'm not going all in

There's one more thing I want to make clear.

I'm not quitting my job.

A lot of entrepreneurial advice seems to romanticize going all in. Quit the job. Take the risk. Burn the boats.

That's not what I'm going to do.

Remember: most of these experiments probably won't work.

I have a family. I have responsibilities. And, more importantly, I already have a life I don't want to destroy while trying to build a better one.

So I'm going to play this surprisingly safe.

I'll keep my job and start experimenting with SaaS on the side.

I haven't built a SaaS before. There is a lot I don't know, and I'll probably make plenty of mistakes. So I'm going to move slowly: learn something, apply it, build something, see what happens, and then do it again.

But there are things I don't want this project to consume.

Time with my family. Exercise. Sleep. Travel. Rest. Having fun.

Those aren't obstacles standing between me and the goal.

They're part of the reason I'm doing this in the first place.

So yes, these experiments will cost me time.

The difference is that I'm going to put a boundary around that cost.

I'll carve out a small part of my week for learning and building, while protecting the life I already have. For me, that means using quiet hours when I'm unlikely to be spending time with my family anyway — including waking up earlier to work on the project.

Maybe nothing I build will ever become an outlier.

That's possible.

But unlike working an extra hour for an extra hour's pay, I'm using those hours to create things that can keep working after I stop.

And even when an experiment fails, I keep the skills, the code, the experience, and everything else I learned along the way.

I'm not betting my life on finding an outlier.

I'm protecting my life while giving myself repeated chances to find one.