During the early years of my life I was taught to draw straight lines between the effort and the results. Starting from having additional desert, through the marks, ending with the most problematic topic - income.

Strangely, I never could understood the correlations. There were topic that required no to small effort and I was getting great results. And I was forced to keep focusing on getting other topic or areas to raise to around the same results. Now, getting back to those moments decades later I feel like that was one of the biggest lies.

Effortless effort

First of all - it is impossible to achieve anything on physical level without an effort. These might be at least ideas defined in words or drawn. Like this article. This might be physical effort - combined or not with information sharing. Actions are required to materialize anything.

The context might be positive for the activity - it may bring additional “multiplier” for the result, neutral - allows this to happen. Negative - generates additional challenged, obstacles, decreases effectiveness of the actions.

Meaningful effortless effort is extremely subjective. If that requires small effort and can be done by anyone or at least by the most people on the globe - it won’t be of a high value. Simple actions = low value due to its commodity.

Effortless effort is either a unique result or non-unique result that subjectively takes less effort. In simple words - it brings joys to an author, charges and makes them happy. It must be aligned with deep values, goals, missions. It erases time, distance and effort. Physical and mental fatigue is compensated with myriad of positive emotions.

Sometimes it is tempting to think it can be done endlessly. A side note: that’s a hyper-focus trap. That’s not yet non-linear results.

Effortless results

That’s such an interesting topic. There are so many ideas available around the Internet of attracting life of my dreams. These aren’t lies, but this isn’t working exactly like somebody might imagine. Laying down and visualizing, pronouncing mantras etc. won’t bring you new house or Mercedes. Well, I won’t say never, as life bring surprises, but that’d should be rather an exception.

On the bright part - focusing on positive thoughts, relaxing and feeling better about (yet) unrealistic life may bring positive effects. Reduced stress and anxiety activates brain, feelings, improves health and increases our chance to generate and implement valuable ideas.

Instead of dreaming about the results - effortless results should rather be called results achieved with a relatively small amount of effort (resources) of any kind. And it is not enough to feel like “oh that’s nothing for me to achieve this”. We have to compare amount of resources we spend to other humans.

Once we figure where we can spend less for achieving the same - we are probably on the right path. Next step is figuring out how many people are out there than can achieve that with the same or even less amount of resources. This helps to determine the uniqueness of the result.

Market

Now it’s time to get to the market and see what people are for. Let’s imagine we can produce a great engine and we can put it into a city bus. Our buses and engines are fully compatible. It takes no additional effort to do so. It will let a bus to reach 200km/h.

The next moment announcement is published I bet the question is coming: “but why?!”. Who needs a city bus to be able to reach speed of 200km/h? In reality - nobody. At this point commute as we know it isn’t up for the speed. Fuel economy is completely different story.

Let’s say we can rework the engine and introduce 17% fuel economy. Great results. But engines are living 3 time less, requires 2x faster oil exchange and became harder to maintain.

We did what market wants, but we have introduced changes to additional aspects of the Great Bus, that made it the worst possible choice. We came for fame and success. We’re leaving the Market square ashamed with a failure. We must spend 3 more years to build engine from scratch.

Non-linear dependency

Finally getting everything together. Non-linear results are mostly coming from automation of any sort. Publish an article, painting, song. Invent, write, record once. Then replicate endlessly at low costs getting the same results.

Software is even better - ideally once written can be copied endlessly. In practice - requires maintenance, updates. However this is what makes it tempting area.

The problem is - result is not guaranteed anymore. Nobody can guarantee we sell the book 100k times. Our song will get 10M downloads within a month. Software license will be bough 10k times. And if someone is trying to guarantee that, well... be cautious :)

The risks. Of not getting paid for the effort. Not getting noticed. 0 promises. Unknown grounds - terra incognita. Here I want to share the best explanation of risk I have heard so far.

Stepping into unknown is the area where we leave space for God to help us. Despite the name and the mechanism we imagine - world might not be the most friendly place, yet it never intends to harm us and destroy us. Sometimes we are too dumb and narrow focused on own plans, missing great opportunities and moments.

I don’t like tl;dr’s, yet this time it is worth to oversimplify.

Non-linear results are rewards that comes at much lowers prices comparing to an average price (no matter what is the resource name we spend to achieve it).

Reward grows with uniqueness.

Unique can’t be repeated - it can be discovered.

To discover unique opportunities - we need to experiment. Experiment = putting effort without knowing, imagining the results. The less guarantees are there - the higher is a chance to hit a success outcome.

Experiments must be narrowed down to the field of interests, aligned with skills and abilities to prevent sad consequences and exhaustion.