Hey friends,
Quick thing before we get started – my Head of YouTube, Tintin, is launching a YouTube thumbnail course this week, designed specifically for educational YouTubers. If you’re an educational channel and you struggle to make thumbnails that get views, or just want to level up in general, this course will definitely help you out. It’s available at a special launch price until midnight on Monday, check it out here.
(Note for our PTYA students: As a thank you for being part of our community, there’s an exclusive discount available—just fill out this form to claim it)
Anyway, this week I’m on a personal development retreat in California hosted by Joe Hudson’s team at The Art of Accomplishment. I’m not supposed to be doing any ‘work’ so for this week’s LifeNotes issue I’m going to cheat and bring up one of the issues from the archive that people seemed to like.
The magic of compounding returns…
There are many areas of our life where the more time / effort we put into something, the less we gain in return. This is commonly known as the law of diminishing returns.
The classic example of this is the impact of money on our level of happiness – while money can make us somewhat happy, that’s only true up to a certain point. (Daniel Kahneman, for instance, says this point is around $75,0000 per year).
Another example is personal productivity. Beyond a certain number of hours worked, our output tends to plateau and then gradually begins to fall.
So, this got me thinking. What are the areas of my life where I actually get compounding returns (i.e. exponential output) the more time I put into it?
I think one area where this is true is with habit building.
For example, we’re likely to get compounding returns with our fitness level the more consistent we are at going to the gym. And we’re likely to get compounding returns for our business the more time we spend marketing it and trying to grow it.
But, there are some area of life where compounding returns are less expected.
One of those areas is starting a YouTube channel.
You might think that putting more hours into YouTube would lead to diminishing returns. But, the number of hours you put into YouTube doesn’t really matter. What actually matters is the number of videos you create.
So, if it takes you 20 hours to create one video and 30 hours to create two videos, then it actually makes sense to spend the added time creating the extra video because that massively increases the odds of you succeeding on YouTube.
I think another area is having team members.
You might think that having someone on your team for a long time will lead to diminishing returns as they get comfortable in their role. But, if that person is consistently levelling up, building their organisational knowledge (i.e. they know how the business works), and get faster at doing good work, then that’s clearly a massive advantage compared to another business that constantly has to hire new people.
Similarly, there are compounding returns to having clarity of focus.
It’s very tempting to try to do too many things with our life. But this makes it very hard to make any significant progress. Instead, if we just focus on one thing – whether it’s a niche on YouTube or a workout plan or whatever – we’ll probably get some decent compounding returns.
So, are there any areas of your life where you’ve experienced compounding returns from putting more time and effort into something? If so, please let me know by hitting reply to this email 🙂
Have a great week!
Ali xx
