The Performance Premium

1. The Performance Premium

"One of the most important things I didn't understand about the world when I was a child is the degree to which the returns for performance are superlinear. 

Teachers and coaches implicitly told us the returns were linear. "You get out," I heard a thousand times, "what you put in." They meant well, but this is rarely true. If your product is only half as good as your competitor's, you don't get half as many customers. You get no customers, and you go out of business.

It's obviously true that the returns for performance are superlinear in business. Some think this is a flaw of capitalism, and that if we changed the rules it would stop being true. But superlinear returns for performance are a feature of the world, not an artifact of rules we've invented. We see the same pattern in fame, power, military victories, knowledge, and even benefit to humanity. In all of these, the rich get richer. 

You can't understand the world without understanding the concept of superlinear returns. And if you're ambitious you definitely should, because this will be the wave you surf on." 

— Paul Graham, from the book Superlinear Returns, cited in Shane Parrish’s weekly newsletter, Farnam Street: newsletter@farnamstreetblog.com

2. All Success Is A Lagging Indicator

"From the outside looking in, author Philipp Meyer had the kind of success that is easy to not just be envious of, but angry about. His first two published novels, American Rust and The Son, were massive critical and commercial hits.American Rust won the 2009 Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, and The Son was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 2014. Both were adapted into TV series.

"If those were the accolades collected over the course of an entire career, it’d be enough to put that writer up there with the all-time greats. (Indeed, outlets like the Washington Post and New York Times have compared Meyer to literary greats like William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway). It seemed like Meyer hit two grand-slam home runs with his first two at-bats.

⁠"But as Meyer recently shared on a recent episode of The Daily Stoic Podcast, he wasn’t the overnight success he appears to be:

‘I had two unpublished novels. I spent all of my twenties failing. I wrote one long terrible novel that was unreadable. Then I wrote a second book that was also pretty bad. And then I ended up moving back into my parents basement…I spent 10 years really wanting to write but apparently I wasn’t good at it. I spent 10 years not publishing anything, 10 years of thinking of myself as a writer…So what I saw was that I kept on failing. What I saw about my career, early on, is that all I did was fail. That was my impression of it. And then after 15 years or so, American Rust was published.”

"All success is a lagging indicator. So too is wisdom and insight. Nothing comes from nowhere. Not success. Not awards. Not a TV series. Not strength. Not greatness. Everything is a lagging indicator. Of years and years of working, trying, and failing, of enduring. Of whether or not you keep going when most would give up.

That’s what you’re going through right now. So keep going."

-- From “The Daily Stoic” blog, by Ryan Holiday

3. It Is More than Veterans Day to Me!

November 11th is an extraordinarily important day in my life.

On November 11th, 1925, my dad, Chuck Perkey, was born in Plymouth, Indiana.

On November 11th, 1954, my in-laws, A.W. and Mary Lee Harrison Stewart, were married in Richmond, Virginia.

Readers of Thoughts for the Week are quite smart, and many of you have had “The Talk” (the one about where babies come from), thus I will refrain from reciting the chain of events that led from those November 11th events to me roaming this earth. (Parts of that discussion can get quite graphic)

Honorable mention goes to my mom, Virginia Mille Brooks Perkey, aka “Ginnie” born in 1926. Being a life-long overachiever, Ginnie opted to arrive a week earlier – her birthday is November 4th.