stay in the game

Here is a problem:
A lotus flower fell onto a lake. It doubles in size every 24 hours and completely covers the lake in 50 days. On which day will it cover half of the lake’s surface?

When I was very young, I remember answering “25 days” to this problem and getting it wrong. Looking back on it now, it’s a problem that explains the Power Law in a remarkably simple way. This year, I witnessed unexpected benefits simply by staying long enough in a game governed by the Power Law.

In an exam setting where the problem is presented, understanding the Power Law intellectually is sufficient—you just need to write down the answer. However, in the real world where the Power Law is actually at play, merely understanding it in theory doesn’t seem to be enough to achieve meaningful results. Something else is required.

Let’s say you commit to diligently doing something for 50 days to see the fruits of the Power Law. By day 25, your efforts might deserve praise. By day 40, it could be called truly remarkable dedication. Yet, you must understand that even after 25 or 40 days, you’ll see almost nothing on the lake. This is a story about thresholds—the point where “something starts to appear” in the Power Law occurs far later than our intuition might expect. This delay causes many people to give up after 25 days or even 40 days.

What makes the game even harder is that the “50 days” is not a guaranteed timeframe. It could take 100 days, or perhaps you may never see the lotus fully cover the lake in your lifetime.

In a situation where nothing can be predicted with certainty, expecting the Power Law seems to require simply trusting the game and staying in it long enough. There are opportunities that only appear and doors that only open when you persist. Exponential growth is not intuitive on a human scale, and neither is the path to achieving it. While we might want to believe that consistent effort will yield results, exponential growth often emerges through completely unexpected events.

Through antifragility, I learned not to bet strongly on predicting outcomes in a complex system or expecting things to unfold exactly as planned. Instead, it’s about staying in the game I trust for a long time and seizing the occasional “hubs” of opportunity when they appear.

just stay in the game.