When I shared the launch of my book, many of you asked about how I got started. Running a startup full-time gave me very little time to do anything else. My writing started with a single Saturday a month to destress and organize some thoughts.

Roughly, that translated to 15-minutes a day. That, along with a $5 a month on Medium is all I had to start. This one’s for all the potential writers out there. I’ll shave off the details and drive three points home in this piece:

1. Small Causes, Big Events

Outsized outcomes like a book deal can suggest it demands a correspondingly input: significant effort and time. That’s known as the proportionality bias, or “the tendency to assume big events have big causes”. The Journal of Economic Surveys argues that psychology of conspiracy theories come from the same bias:

Now, I don’t want to downplay the role of luck or the effort of other authors who’ve put in tons of effort to make their book deal happen. That said, the purpose of Asymmetric Principles as you’ll see in the book is to maximize that surface area of luck. Specifically, it’s structurally placing yourself in the way of luck, similar to how Naval describes writing on X:

The mechanics play here is the asymmetric or skewed bets we use in early-stage investments, where a single investment have outcomes that dwarf the cost and the risk of investing. A 1,000x return means you can be wrong most of the time and still come out winning. The ratio of investment to win doesn’t change by investment size.

15-minutes is sufficient investment for a big outcome.

2. Compounding Takes Time

How growth tends to happen for an outsized return is exponential, and the rewards tend to be ballooned towards the end - not in a linear fashion. And while it is possible for outsized returns to happen overnight, such outcomes are usually a reward simply accumulated in the end.

Of course, that’s not to suggest that I’ve achieved that level of outcome, but it does have some compounding effects at play. My first post on Medium was November of 2021. I didn’t monetize until March of 2022, when I decided to commit to that 6-hour Saturday writing block per month, or about one piece per month. Even then, it wasn’t until March 2023 that I hit $100 a month.

But in just 4 months after the first $100, I reached $1,000 without increasing effort. The commitment was still 6-hours a month. And it was in August, I was invited to speak at the first Medium Day, which eventually led to the book deal with Wiley. Everyone knows, but it can be hard to be persistent until compounding effects kick-in.

Compounding exponential growth takes time.

3. You’re Probably Already a Writer

With the advent of what looks like an AI technological revolution, Paul Graham, the co-founder of Y-Combinator, recently shared an essay predicting that the world may be divided into writes and write-nots. AI will help anyone “write” to a reasonable level, splitting the group into the very best writers and everyone else. Though perhaps contentious, he concludes that this is a bad thing, because writing is how people think.

The good news is that most of you are probably already writers. Investors write memos, consultants write decks, product managers write scopes, and creators write posts. It’s simply a matter of making small changes to what you’re already doing to structurally place yourself in the way of outsized returns.

The Super Upside Factor shares a step-by-step guide to consistently generate outsized returns. I’d love to have you take a read!