Very coherent piece on a familiar concept.<p>I think of spikes as ways to sustain streams. They&#x27;re also the quick route to making bad decisions. It&#x27;s encouraging to see your investments jump in value every now and then, but if you sell a stock that&#x27;s doing badly when you could have waited until it bounced back, you&#x27;re making a bad decision. Another instance: you&#x27;re steadily learning machine learning, and the motivation starts to drop; you post your little project on HN, and it makes the front page for a day; you suddenly feel better about learning it. In this case, the spike is a sneak peek into the future: you&#x27;ll have a decent following if you really push yourself to learn.