Don’t Bet on the First Try, Plan for the Hundredth

Don’t expect your first video to go viral, and don’t expect your first sales trip to land ten million dollars, but you can ask what happens after the hundredth try.

Author: Koutian Wu; GitHub: ktwu01

I wrote that down while rereading my diary from November 30. That day I recorded almost four minutes of voice notes to myself, and it all came down to one idea. Everything has to be done continuously.

Technology has to be done continuously, you cannot expect it to pay off the first time. Communication has to be done continuously too, one round of publicity never works. I asked myself whether I was doing surface work, trying to make people like me. Communication is fine, but the thing that really needs doing is to get the technology right, and then keep communicating, again and again. Not on a whim. All the time. Everything works this way.

People who are truly useful may need a year to produce something really big. Do not think one month, one task a day, and results by the end of the month.

Here is what I was doing that very day.

I was recording a demo video showing how to use AI coding. Halfway through I realised it was not that useful. Post a single video and you pay for editing, time, opportunity cost, and you risk exposing private information. It was a thankless job. If someone was watching over my shoulder, fine. If nobody watches and nobody pays, it is a waste of time.

So I set a rule. Don’t do this again. Or if I do, cut it into 100 clips and post all of them, and then the return is actually worth it.

Those two thoughts turned out to be the same thought.

One side says keep investing, if once does not work, do it a hundred times. The other side says be efficient, one piece of material posted once is waste, cut into a hundred pieces it counts. If you are going to do something a hundred times, you had better know the marginal cost of each round. Grit alone will not carry you to try number one hundred.

What scares most people is the slow part. Compounding is so slow at the start that it feels pointless, and most people quit right before the curve bends.

So before I start something now, I don’t ask whether it will pay off this month. I ask whether I can do it a hundred times, and whether each round can be amplified and reused.

Work has to be efficient, and it has to have a method.

Let time be our helper, compounding.