Stop waiting. Stop talking yourself out of it. Stop researching. Go do it. - James Clear

One of the common trappings of success is overproducing.

Companies make money and rapidly expand their product line. Authors become popular and churn out books at a faster clip.

Scale can empower, but it can also dilute. Something is lost when quantity is valued over quality.

You have to maintain your standards even when all the forces around you seem to be calling for growth. Push back against more, more, more and remain committed to better, better, better.

There are all kinds of cheat codes lying around, but they usually look boring. People will routinely ignore things that already work for the hope of a slightly easier path. The cheat code is the work you're avoiding.

Similarly, habits often appear to make no difference until you cross a critical threshold and unlock a new level of performance. In the early and middle stages of any quest, there is often a Valley of Disappointment. You expect to make progress in a linear fashion and it’s frustrating how ineffective changes can seem during the first days, weeks, and even months. It doesn’t feel like you are going anywhere. It’s a hallmark of any compounding process: the most powerful outcomes are delayed. This is one of the core reasons why it is so hard to build habits that last. People make a few small changes, fail to see a tangible result, and decide to stop. You think, “I’ve been running every day for a month, so why can’t I see any change in my body?” Once this kind of thinking takes over, it’s easy to let good habits fall by the wayside. But in order to make a meaningful difference, habits need to persist long enough to break through this plateau — what I call the Plateau of Latent Potential.