Compounding by exploration

Dan Murphy, December 21 2023

Explore some mental territory.

Compounding

Compounding, as you’re probably aware, is when some quantity is grown at some rate for some period of time.

In a financial context earning compound interest transforms modest sums of money into sumptuous ones.

Skills and knowledge can (but don’t necessarily) compound in a way that allows you to learn and do increasingly more as you level up. Because you know how to write Ruby code, learning Python becomes much easier. Because you picked up some music theory while learning the piano, you can quickly figure out how to make chords on the guitar.

This compounding of knowledge doesn’t work very well if the knowledge you acquire is short-lived or mere rote memorization.

If you’ve memorized how to place your hands on the piano keys to make a major chord, but don’t understand that the combination of intervals between the notes determines what kind of chord it is, then your knowledge is less transferrable and therefore compounds less effectively.

But in general, compounding of knowledge is something of a holy grail in the realm of personal development: learn something that compounds well every day and in time you will be far more capable than you were previously.

Diminishing returns

Of course the idea of knowledge compounding in the way that money does is only an imperfect analogy.

You could also argue that gaining knowledge in a particular field is something with diminishing marginal returns.

The more you know about a given topic, the less there is to learn about it and the more time and effort you must spend to gain an additional unit of knowledge.

While I think both compounding and diminishing marginal returns do apply to knowledge, in my experience compounding is most relevant when we’re talking about leveraging interdisciplinary knowledge. Your knowledge of physics might give you a useful perspective in some other domain. One famous example of this is the term “critical mass”, which comes from physics but aptly describes other domains.

This is a great reason to actively seek out knowledge that lays outside of your established area of expertise¹.

Finding gains

If knowledge can compound, but acquiring knowledge in a given domain yields diminishing marginal returns, then the act of learning outside your given area of expertise takes on outsized importance.

Think about this in your daily life. If you’ve been working in your given field for many years, you’re not likely to have many days where you achieve a massive step forward in your abilities or understanding of that field.

This isn’t to say developing expertise is bad, or that it’s not worth the time and effort to achieve those small additional gains in your area of specialization.

It’s to point out that a very powerful supplement to that type of growth is the exploration of new fields, ones in which you’re not an expert. If we really want to achieve compounding knowledge, we’d be well served to not rely solely on a source of learning with diminishing marginal returns.

Inhibitors and blinders

Why does staying in our area of expertise have diminshing marginal returns for learning? There are at least a couple factors at play here²:

Things that prevent us from taking advantage of the opportunities for growth and learning we’re presented with. Let’s call these inhibitors.
Things that prevent us from encountering or noticing opportunities for growth and learning. Let’s call these blinders.

For me personally inhibitors are mostly some form of egotism. They are aversions to accepting the truth that we are not as smart, skilled, or aware as our egos would have us believe.

Quite steathily these tend to grow stronger as we become older and more accomplished. No one expects a novice or young person to know much of anything. Many people, including ourselves, expect an “expert” to know a great deal and to be highly proficient at what they do.

This is why it’s so painful to err in a domain we consider ourselves competent in. Oliver Burkeman relates this fact by discussing hobbies. Hobbies are almost by definition something we take lightly. I know I’m not a good musician, I only do it for fun. I put in a few minutes when I can and I don’t expect to be very good. I’m totally ok with this!

But something like our profession, we tend to take very seriously. We’ve put in years of time, made sacrifices, unwittingly staked our identity and ego to it.

And so the tendency when we fall short is not to be receptive to learning from the failure, it’s to unconsciously defend our fragile egos. We blame the other person or the circumstances. We make excuses. We complain. We do just about anything besides honestly ask, “what could I have done differently or better?”.

Like inhibitors, blinders have a nasty tendency to increase as we age or progress in some domain.

We know some things now, we are comfortable in some domain, we are respected and capable there. It feels difficult and uncomfortable by comparison to venture out into some place where we are clueless, inept, unknown.

So we stay in our lane. We don’t learn or create outside of our chosen profession. When we are learning or creating it’s often some variation of what we’re already comfortable with.

Exploration

The best way to combat inhibitors and blinders is to actively seek out new areas for learning. Being a novice is both humbling and freeing. Humbling because you’ll likely be awful at whatever you’re trying. Freeing because you will at least temporarily have a chance at beginner’s mind: you can drop your egoic defenses and be truly receptive to experiencing something new.

A key question here is what we should explore³. Of course this will depend greatly on the individual, but if your goal is increased competency in some domain then a good strategy is to learn a new but adjacent domain.

For example engineers, designers, and product managers at software companies can all become better at what they do by learning some of what their teammates do. An engineer with good knowledge of UX principles can make low-hanging improvements to a UI touched by the PR they’re working on⁴. A PM with programming skills can better understand the dependencies and risk present in the features they’re conceptualizing.

This kind of cross-functional skill also allows you to unblock yourself without adding extra work for your team.

A good friend told me that learning SQL early on in his career as a product manager was a huge win. He could answer his own questions rather than wait for an engineer to get around to doing it, and as a result of being forced to understand the structure of the data he would often learn more in building the queries than simply looking at the results would’ve shown him.

Beyond unlocking new capabilities for yourself, when you can combine different skill sets you gain empathy and understanding for your teammates. If you really appreciate all of the thought and care that goes into a well designed UX or the difficulty in figuring out a nasty bug, then you can’t help but feel a little more compassionate and appreciative towards the people you work with when you see them going through those processes.

Hubs

There are some domains that are adjacent to many others, let’s call these hubs. I’d argue that in the world of business, finance and management are hubs. Everyone has some impact on the bottom line, and the vast majority of people are either managed or managers.

Want to know how you’re doing in your manager’s eyes or how to advance your career? Ask them what resources they used when they first became managers. What books did they read, what did their mentors teach them? Learning how they view management as a craft won’t guarantee you do well, but it will help you understand the lens through which you’re viewed and how you can adjust your actions accordingly.

Want to know how safe your job is or which job you should take next? Understand the company’s finances and how your team and individual results contribute to them. The deeper this understanding is the better your decision making will be.

It’s crazy to me that I worked for years at venture backed start-ups without really understanding how venture capital works. If you work at a VC-backed start-up and don’t know what a liquidation preference or a limited partner is, then you’re doing yourself a disservice.

Have fun

It’s a bit mind bending to think that all of your prior experiences, lessons, and insights may be working in your favor today, helping you to glean from the world things you may otherwise have missed.

In order to fully leverage that process you need to explore new mental territories.

I have good news about this: it’s fun! Oftentimes there is a bit of inertia that needs to be overcome to start - maybe scrolling Reddit seems more appealing than learning how a neural network works. But typically after making the time to learn something new I feel more energized, not less. Happier, more satisfied, excited.

The key is to take small bites. Don’t burn yourself out. Just learn a little something new on most days, and you’ll soon look back on a body of knowledge that is more than the sum of its parts.

Could your business benefit from expert software engineering, product development or team building? Get in touch at hello@rdnt.software or visit https://rdnt.software/ to get started.

Radiant Software builds exceptional digital products using Ruby on Rails, React, Node.js, Python or your technology of choice.

We can accelerate your product development process with rapid prototypes, A/B testing, and analysis of technical feasibility. Or leverage our experience to level up your engineering team with technical interviewing, mentorship, and training in modern software development practices.

Footnotes

The late Charlie Munger was probably the most famous advocate for this interdisciplinary approach to learning.
This list is surely incomplete.
Another great strategy is to simply follow your curiosity.
It’s important not to confuse this nascent knowledge with expertise: an engineer taking UX 101 hopefully doesn’t believe they know better than their co-worker who’s been at it for a decade.