Ask HN: Peter Theil Power laws for individual
It&#x27;s fun to think about IMO.<p>In studying different models of personality, one comes across a similar phenomenon where an individual tends to naturally close in on some smaller set of capacities that they can&#x2F;do lean on to do huge amounts of work.<p>You can call it &quot;having a specific personality&quot; in that it&#x27;s a center of gifts, reliable energy activities for that individual, etc. but it&#x27;s not usually fully conscious and you need to study a lot to identify and develop this. Power law principles really obviously apply. You can really push yourself here. Most people don&#x27;t realize how much and how to push without becoming a workaholic.<p>What I did then, personally, was to identify these centers in myself and then attempt to change all of my work focus to rely more on those capacities.<p>As it turns out I had already started to do the exact reverse of that around quarter-life, which is common as a resting&#x2F;recovering function that is very easily interpreted as &quot;new career mission&quot;.<p>So I backed out of that a bit, used the recovery centers for recovery purposes, and maneuvered more in the direction of reliable, natural leverage.<p>This was in a way very difficult because like many of us, I wasn&#x27;t raised in an environment where this was taught or even thought to be healthy. So even my inner voice was extremely pessimistic.<p>(But I was also used to this from coaching groups and corporate teams. You can tell a tiger it&#x27;s a tiger, but if it&#x27;s already learned to scratch out its name on paper, maybe it really wants to hear that it&#x27;s a master calligrapher.)<p>So there were many difficulties, but overall it&#x27;s worked really well so far.<p>(I am not completely sure if this answers your question but I want to think I understood what you were getting at :-))