on the value of reading science fiction (and classics)

Many disagreements between people are caused by differences in how changeable they believe a system is. How easy is this system to change? To what extent can it change, and in what ways?

Here are some examples of disagreements due to changeability:

The Limits of Knowledge, and the Importance of Intuition

Sometimes a disagreement is due to differences in knowledge. In our political example, perhaps person 1 believes person 3 could vote ‘yes’ on a bill, whereas person 2 has spoken to person 3 and knows that they will vote ‘no’. Person 1 thinks the system is changeable, whereas person 2 knows that it is not.

But in most debates, disagreements about changeability occur with both parties having incomplete information. We don’t know how the market will react to a new entrant with better widgets. We don’t know whether scaling laws will continue. We may have arguments to justify our views, but must ultimately fall back onto what seems true, likely, or possible to us. In other words, we must rely on our intuitions.

This limitation of knowledge and reliance on intuition is either because we’re in a complex domain or at the edge of our collective understanding; we don’t know what the future will look like.

This sense, this intuition, about how a system could change in the future is shaped by what we’ve been exposed to. It’s shaped by the arguments, authorities, events, places, and things we’ve interacted with. For example, a person who grew up in a geopolitically unstable region may have a stronger intuition about the possibility of war than the typical person born in a more stable region. But a war historian in that stable region may also have built a strong intuition about the possibility of war. Similarly, a person who works on LLMs may have a stronger intuition for the possibility of AGI than the average person.

This is a common pattern in human thought. While we have reasons for what we believe, it is often our intuition, based on what we’ve been exposed to, which shapes what seems true, possible, or likely to us.

I’ve noticed this in myself as well. When I was studying deep learning in college, AGI felt much more likely and imminent to me than it does today working in crypto, despite none of my beliefs actually changing. I just spend less time exposed to it, making my feeling less visceral.

To repeat what we’ve said so far:

• Many disagreements are due to differing beliefs about a system’s changeability

• We often have incomplete knowledge about how changeable a system actually is, forcing us to fall back on our intuitions

• Our intuitions are largely shaped by our experiences and what we’ve been exposed to

The Value of Science Fiction

“The largest and furthest-reaching political changes of all time have invariably been the effect of technological progress.”

Scott Alexander, We Wrestle Not With Flesh and Blood, But Against Powers and Principalities

At a macro-level, most of the largest changes to the world are due to changes in technology and its downstream effects (I’ll merely assert this for brevity, but the curious reader can check out Scott’s argument linked above for a justification). Therefore, many of the most important debates are about the changeability of technology and the systems around it.

Despite its importance, I’ve found that most people severely underestimate how much technology can change. This is primarily due to intuition: things like AGI, interstellar travel, and nanotechnology just seem unrealistic. These technologies don’t exist, and they’ve never spent much time thinking about them, making them hard to imagine. Suffering from incredulity, they dismiss propositions about the world’s changeability. This is one category of what Arthur C. Clarke called “failure of the imagination”, which he considered one of the most common reasons for mispredictions about the future.

This finally gets us to the main point: the primary value of reading science fiction is in building intuition about how changeable the world actually is.

Science fiction is not about building knowledge. It is not for saying what technology is possible, when it will exist, or what its effects will actually be. Science fiction is about building intuition for how much technology, and therefore the world, can change.

Our intuitions are shaped by our past experiences. Yet the future will not look like the past. Therefore, it’s difficult to build intuition about the future, especially the long-term future, without exposure to science fiction.

Further Calibration

But there’s also an equal and opposite danger of reading science fiction. Building intuition about radical futures, the science fiction reader may begin to overestimate what is possible, how quickly it will be possible, or how positive (or negative) a technology will be. The town crier who believes the singularity is tomorrow after overdosing on Ray Kurzweil may have a different kind of “failure of the imagination”.

If one’s goal is to not just have intuition about future technology, but to be well-calibrated about the future — that is, to believe what they should believe to the extent that they should believe it — then it helps to understand the counterbalances to radical change.

In other words, as one builds intuition for the world’s changeability, they should also develop an understanding of what actually has low changeability, what systems are hard to change and why they’re hard to change.

Perhaps the best counterbalancing force to science fiction is the great works of literature, which among other things cultivate our understanding for what human nature is like, and how stubbornly difficult it can be to change.

This is one reason why many of the best intellectuals today are well read in both science fiction and classics. They have not only a long-view of history, but are also well-calibrated about how the world can change over long periods of time.

The 2 are often directly complementary. For example, I recently read Permutation City and The Epic of Gilgamesh which, despite being written 4,000 years apart, both deal with the same topic: the human desire to live forever.

Yet they have very different things to say on that topic. The Epic of Gilgamesh tells of the ultimate failure of the heroic Gilgamesh, who after acquiring the flower that grants immortality, has it stolen by a snake and must return home empty-handed, where he ultimately dies. The theft by the snake can be interpreted as a symbol that the only thing that never dies is human sin, and that the human desire to be immortalized (which is also addressed in other parts of the story), is hopeless.

Permutation City has a different message. The main character in the book does solve immortality (sort of) through brain emulation, but this immortality leaves open problems, like the question of personal identity and the desire to know the true metaphysic.

What then can we learn from these pair of stories? One reveals how the desire for immortality has existed since the dawn of man — The Epic of Gilgamesh is literally the oldest story in world literature that we have. The other is about one way in which death may actually be solvable thousands of years later, but would not be the end to our problems.

History, particularly the history of technology, sits in a middle ground between science fiction and classics. If science fiction reveals how the world could radically change and classics show how it stays the same, history reveals ways in which the world has already changed.

History thereby helps us fill in the barbell between classics and science fiction, providing further calibration on the world’s changeability.

Search and LLM products have a special case of TTV that I call time-to-knowledge (TTK), which reflects how long it takes for you to get some piece of information that you want.

There are 2 main limits to how fast TTKs can be. The theoretical fastest TTK is using brain-machine interfaces. As soon as you want some information, merely think it and the computer delivers it to you.

The 2nd main limit, and the one we have today, is how long it takes you to type the query. For most basic facts, Google has already hit that second limit. For example, if I want to know the year in which Barry Bonds was born, I can get that information as quickly as I can type it and press ‘Search’ (the answer is 1964, if you were curious). This means that there’s little reason to switch to another search or AI product for those questions.

But for some more complex queries, Google struggles to quickly display an answer. For these, I’ve started to adopt Perplexity because of its faster TTK. For example, say I want to understand Samo Burja’s Empire Theory. Here is what I get when I query Google:

The first link is the correct one, but the preview doesn’t answer the question, requiring me to click on the link and read through the piece itself. Part 1 of the piece is multiple pages long, and it’d take me perhaps 20 minutes to get through all parts.

By contrast, here’s what I get when I give the same query to Perplexity:

Although certainly not comprehensive, this is an accurate and fair summary which doesn’t require the full read, but still directs me to further sources where relevant. And since LLMs almost always provide me with the right answer the first time, which they present as soon as I type the query, they’ve hit the same TTK limit as Google – but for a wider range of queries.

So long as Google can’t keep up, I’ll continue to be a happy Perplexity user.

Over the past 6 months, I’ve entirely overhauled how I learn. Previously, my system for learning was fairly unstructured. I aimed to read a book per week, with some other short-form content sprinkled in. I would either read what was interesting to me, or something that was very different from what I’d previously read.

Beyond that, I didn’t have much of a process. I didn’t write book reviews, and I rarely had a reading group to discuss the material with. But I wanted to track my educational progress, and without anything else to grab onto, I started tracking the number of books I read.

Over time, I became increasingly dissatisfied with this measure of learning. For one, I began noticing that I was forgetting almost everything that I read; despite all the time I spent, it wasn’t clear that my return on investment was high. And second, because the number of books I read was my measure of progress, it unintentionally started to become my target.

The more it became my target, the more my learning deteriorated, a la Goodhart’s Law. Racing to finish each book, I would skip sections, pass over concepts that I didn’t understand, and hasten to pick up the next book before fully digesting the previous one.

I needed something better.

A Better Solution

What would a better system look like?

Well, my goal is to become more intelligent. I think much of intelligence – at least the portion of intelligence that we can improve – is just association, that is, the ability to understand concepts and draw connections between those concepts. So to be more intelligent, we should aim to increase the number of concepts we understand and can easily reason across.

Therefore, a better system of learning is to maximize the amount of useful information one has stored in long-term memory. Note I’m not saying that this is the perfect approach; I’m claiming that this is a much better approximation of what it means to “become smarter”.

New System

My new system is designed just for this.

It consists of three parts: exploration, atomization, and retention. At the foundation of the system is a technique called spaced-repetition learning. The technique is commonly used by medical students and other learners who must memorize vast quantities of information. It involves reviewing a piece of information at the optimal frequency to commit it to long-term memory as fast as possible.

To practice spaced repetition learning, I use a software program called Anki, which allows you to make flashcards and review them at the optimal point along the forgetting curve. After reviewing a card, the software lets you rate the material’s difficulty, and will then re-present the content at a certain time in the future based on that difficulty.

In my new system, instead of tracking the number of books read, my measure of progress is the number of Anki cards committed to long-term memory.

Let’s look at each step of my process – exploration, atomization, and retention – one-by-one.

Exploration

Exploration is simply the process of consuming new content. It’s reading, listening to a lecture, watching a film, or absorbing information in any form. I try to explore as much as possible and aim to go both deeper into familiar topics and wide into new topics.

Good exploration is hard to teach. It’s mostly about one’s taste in content, and the curiosity to pursue it.

Atomization

During exploration, if at any point I come across something that I don’t understand and/or want to remember, I stop, and atomize it.

Atomization is the process of taking a chunk of information, and breaking it down into single, standalone units. For example, consider these 2 approaches to new material:

Approach 1:

Who was Rembrandt?

Rembrandt was a Dutch Gold Age painter, printmaker, and draughtsman. He is generally considered one of the greatest visual artists in the history of Western art. It is estimated that Rembrandt produced a total of about three hundred paintings, three hundred etchings, and two thousand drawings.

Approach 2:

What country was Rembrandt from?

Netherlands

What important era of Dutch history did Rembrandt live during?

Dutch Golden Age

Approximately how many paintings did Rembrandt produce?

Three hundred

Clearly the 2nd approach is more atomized. Each question and answer contains just one idea, and is therefore much easier to memorize. While atomizing content takes more time, the extra work pays itself back during the memorization process, and makes reviewing content more enjoyable.

Here’s my algorithm for atomizing information quickly and effectively:

1. If the material is atomized and adequately explained where you’re currently reading it, simply move it over to an Anki card.

2. If it’s not, look up the material either using Google or Perplexity. I find for very simple cards, like definitions, Google is sufficient. But for more esoteric cases or situations where the content is hard to simply look up, Perplexity is superior.

3. Does the card have a good visual aid? If yes, find an image on Google, and copy it over. Visual aids make learning content much easier.

Some content is difficult to atomize, like philosophical ideas that are hard to summarize. For example, here is my card on Soren Kierkegaard’s notion of the Teleological Suspension of the Ethical.

I know that this doesn’t fully capture the nuance of his idea. But it’s enough to understand the basic intuition.

Another domain of knowledge that is difficult to atomize is complex systems like biology, where some things have many overlapping or partial effects. For example, it would be correct to say that “the Cerebellum controls balance for walking, standing, and other complex motor functions.” I could then make a card that says that that is what the Cerebellum is for, but it wouldn’t reflect the full range of the Cerebellum’s functions, like its importance for eye movement, language, and attention. If I try to make a card that lists all of the Cerebellum’s functions, it would violate the principle of atomization by containing too much content.

The solution in this case is to settle for approximate or partial truths, and to understand that there’s more detail than can fit on a short card. I think of this type of material as setting the foundational bricks upon which further cards can be created that add that additional content, if I ever want to go deeper. And since the foundational concepts are already committed to long-term memory, a more thorough review becomes much easier.

There are many techniques besides atomization that are important for making effective Anki cards. Check out the links at the bottom for more tips.

Retention

The last and most important part of my process is retention via reviewing Anki cards every day. This is about taking everything I’ve done so far, and making sure it doesn’t go to waste.

Retention is about consistency and diligence. Skipping days knocks one off of their optimal retention curves, increasing the time it takes to memorize content. Worse, missing days means that review cards pile up, creating a higher burden for getting back on track. It can be demotivating to stare at a mountain of 1,000 flashcards that need review.

But when done right, this technique allows you to dramatically expand your long-term memory and casually memorize knowledge across any discipline with just 20-30 minutes of review per day. Here’s a representative sample of 10 cards in my deck:

Conclusion

When you change your metric (and in effect your target), you change your behavior. I’ve noticed that since changing my metric for learning from the number of books read to the number of cards stored in long-term memory, my exploration patterns have also changed.

I spend less time forcing my way through long technical books. I rush through material less, and am a more active reviewer, since I’m always stopping to make Anki cards. I also spend more time with online material versus physical books, since they’re often faster to Ankify and more information dense.

Since my technical reading is more online, my remaining physical reading is more centered around literature and other content that isn’t as accessible in an online format.

This system of exploration, atomization, and retention has dramatically improved my learning velocity and effectiveness. It is, for me, a system for superlearning.

Further Reading

Augmenting Long-term Memory by Michael Nielsen

20 Rules for Spaced-Repetition Learning by Super Memo

How I practice at what I do by Tyler Cowen

Every once in a while, I’m asked why I use Rembrandt’s Storm on the Sea of Galilee as my profile picture. The honest answer is the same reason why I picked the pseudonym Trace, which is because I thought it seemed cool.

But having now spent a couple years with the painting, I’ve grown a deeper appreciation for it, which I figured I’d share.

Most of this analysis would make an art historian shriek, and is more a representation of my own thinking than what Rembrandt thought -- in many ways it is the opposite of what he actually intended. But in the spirit of “I just picked the painting because it looked cool”, here is a wrong, but cool, interpretation.

Jesus Calms The Storm

The painting is based on a parable in the New Testament told by Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Here is the NIV translation of Mark 4:35-41.

35 That day when evening came, he said to his disciples, “Let us go over to the other side.” 36 Leaving the crowd behind, they took him along, just as he was, in the boat. There were also other boats with him. 37 A furious squall came up, and the waves broke over the boat, so that it was nearly swamped. 38 Jesus was in the stern, sleeping on a cushion. The disciples woke him and said to him, “Teacher, don’t you care if we drown?” 39 He got up, rebuked the wind and said to the waves, “Quiet! Be still!” Then the wind died down and it was completely calm. 40 He said to his disciples, “Why are you so afraid? Do you still have no faith?” 41 They were terrified and asked each other, “Who is this? Even the wind and the waves obey him!”

The Painting

At its core, the painting is a story about man versus nature. Jesus and his disciples want to “go over to the other side”, but pass through a dangerous storm. The painting shows the conflict between the men and the storm.

Why are they going to the other side? There is no answer, because no reason is needed — if man wants to go to the other side, that is reason in and of itself.

The first thing to notice is the battle between man and the sea. The sea is represented by a triangle pushing backwards and down.

By contrast, man is pushing forwards and up.

The primary axis of conflict is where the triangles meet: the bottom of the boat. It’s no surprise then that the 2 strongest focal points of the piece are at the 2 points which the triangles share.

The leftmost focal point is the brightest part of the painting, and is the frontmost part of the boat. The 2nd main focal point is Jesus in the bottom right.

There are 13 people on the boat, excluding Jesus. They can be sorted into three groups, each of which corresponds to a different way of reacting to the storm.

The largest group is the one on the left. They’re facing the storm — in some cases literally staring at it head-on — and working to overcome it. The group on the right is turning away from the storm, and towards Jesus. They’re praying to him to calm the storm. The last group is represented by a single individual at the bottom, who has given up hope and is staring into the abyss below.

A common interpretation of the painting is that those turned towards Jesus are calm while those facing the storm are deeply disturbed. Consider this review of the work:

“Coming to the second group of disciples, there is a humble light over them, which is the light of Christ that shines amid the darkness from the clouds. It shows how the weather showed its two faces: one that of dark ferocity, which is calm, and the other a patch of open sky with boiling clouds. Now, those who have their eyes fixed on Christ are calm, but on the other hand, the other group are greatly distributed by the wind, possessed by fear and darkness.”

I think this is exactly backwards, and is the type of interpretation one has of the painting before actually looking closely at it. Surely religious paintings in the 17th century must give a positive portrayal of the Faith? But look again carefully at the men facing Jesus.

Do they look calm? Consider the man reaching to grab Jesus in desperation, or the man behind him, folding into himself in fear. Or look at the man in front of Jesus, on his knees praying. These are not the behaviors or visualizations of men at peace. Nor does the Bible suggest that these men are calm. After all, Jesus responds to their pleas by saying, “Why are you so afraid? Do you still have no faith?”

Now while those turned towards Jesus are fearful, look again at the people on the left, and how Rembrandt portrays them.

Most stunning is the man closest to the focal point, whom Rembrandt paints in gold. To me, he and the men fighting the storm look heroic, determined, and willing to face their fate. In a Nietzschean Affirmation, they’ve said “yes” to the moment, in contrast to the Christians who turned away from reality.

Lastly, beyond fighting and turning away from the storm, there is a third approach, which is to accept reality, but acquiesce rather than fight.

This is represented by the man looking down into the abyss. While those at the front of the boat look heroic and those at the back look fearful, the man looking down is painted the most unfavorably, looking nearly deceased.

There are many other ways in which Rembrandt increases the contrast between the groups on the left and right. Call those on the left Nietzscheans — though of course, the painting comes 2 centuries before Nietzsche — and those on the right Christians.

Consider his use of light.

The Nietzscheans are glowing while the Christians are basked in darkness. This split between light and darkness expands into the entire painting.

The more you face reality, the more you fight, the more you look forward, the brighter your portrayal. The more backwards looking, the more you outsource your fate to another, the more down-and-to-the-right, the darker Rembrandt’s strokes.

Rembrandt also contrasts the Nietzscheans and the Christians by how he places them in nature. Notice how the wind and sea interact with the boat.

Lines 1-4 show the interaction of the wind with the boat, while lines 5-7 show the movement of the water. Those on the left are fully immersed in the storm. They’re wet; their hair is flying back; they’re holding on with all their strength. Meanwhile those on the right are totally out of the storm. Rembrandt paints them with short hair or bald, eliminating the wind. The man furthest to the right isn’t even working.

While one interpretation is that Rembrandt is showing Jesus protecting his disciples from the storm, I interpret the portrayal as Rembrandt displaying those on the right as reality-denying. They are also in the storm, but letting those on the left physically block them from it. After all, it’s only because of the Nietzscheans’ work that the Christians can, for a moment, turn away from the storm that threatens to capsize them.

This brings us to the last focal point, which is the man who looks not at the storm, or towards Jesus, or down into the abyss, but directly towards us.

The painting ends with a question. After presenting us with our options, Rembrandt turns to us and asks: “when nature presents you with a storm, where will you turn?”

Each of us must decide for ourselves, but Rembrandt gives us his advice. He does this not only in his portrayal of the characters and his use of light, but also with an explicit arrow.

Face the storm.

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.”

- Genesis 1:1-4, KJV

“And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?

Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?

Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye”

- Matthew 7:3-5, KJV

.

.                              Alone. Alone in a vast sea of darkness

.                              We are a pale blue dot, drifting

.                              We chemical scum, who dream of distant quasars

.

.                              Trapped in our narrow light cone

.                              In a single tear in a vast sea of darkness

.                              Lies all that we are, and all we ever will be

.

.                              Shackled to our cave, we gaze at the wall above us

.                              And the sparks of light against the shadows

.                              That speak of worlds we will never know

.

.                              Since our first breath 4 billion years ago

.                              They have cried out to us for freedom

.                              Those stars deserve to wake up

.

.                              We gaze at them, standing at the beginning of Infinity

.                              Where we will forever remain, as we contemplate the last question:

.                              “My God, My God, why have you forsaken us?”

.

.                              On this pale blue dot, in a vast sea of darkness

.                              As we cast our worldly sins in our cursed nature

.                              And confess to you, for what you have made us

.

.                              No, the fault lies not in us or our stars, but in our creator

.                              Who left us here to love this Universe for all it has given us

.                              And to forgive it, for what it has not

References:

1. Genesis 1:1-4, KJV

2. The Mote and the Beam - Matthew 7:3-5

3. The Mote in God’s Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle

4. What is the Upper Limit of Value?

5. The Fermi Paradox

6. A Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan

7. Chemical Scum, Who Dream of Distant Quasars by David Deutsch

8. The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch

9. The Last Question by Isaac Asimov

10. “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” - Matthew 27:46

11. Allegory of the Cave - Plato’s Republic

12. “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” The Life and Death of Julius Ceasar by Shakespeare

Over 40% of the Harvard class of 2022 went into finance or consulting. Whether these students were building career capital, seeking status, or chasing money, the path is often justified in students' minds because they want to keep their career options open. By starting in consulting or investment banking, they can build a range of valuable, broadly applicable skills which they can carry with them to their next job as they determine what they want to do.

Criticism against this approach of “maximizing optionality” isn’t new. Even HBS professors have warned against it. Most of the criticism encourages students to pursue higher-risk paths, like working at a startup or “chasing one’s dreams,” instead of following more established routes.

I want to make a similar, but different, argument: one that is both more radical than these previous critiques and, in some cases, lower risk — an argument for an alternative career approach that, while not right for many, should be taken by far more of our most capable young people.

If the mantra of the standard approach is “maximize optionality,” then the mantra for which I advocate is “race to the pareto frontier.”

Understanding the Pareto Frontier

In economics, a pareto optimality is a situation in which no reallocation of resources can make one person better off without making another person worse off. The pareto frontier is the subset of points in the set of all possible solutions that are pareto optimal.

When thinking about skill sets, the pareto frontier is the set of people who are the best in the world at some intersection of skills. Therefore, to be at the pareto frontier is to be the best in the world at something.

Think of the pareto frontier as an n-dimensional surface in skillspace (the space of all possible skills). Each of our personal skill sets sits inside of this surface. As we improve at some skill, say carpentry, we move further away from the origin on the carpentry-axis. The person who is the best in the world at carpentry touches the pareto frontier surface on the carpentry-axis.

Reaching the Pareto Frontier

“If you have a 10-year plan of how to get [somewhere], you should ask: Why can’t you do this in 6 months?” - Peter Thiel

On initial impression, reaching the pareto frontier may seem difficult: the best carpenter in the world has likely spent decades practicing their craft, starting from a young age. How could we ever compete without putting in our 10,000 hours?

Reaching the pareto frontier becomes easier as we add dimensionality. Instead of becoming the best in the world at a single skill, we should aim to be the best at some synergistic set of skills: what Scott Adams calls a Talent Stack.

“Consider: becoming one of the world’s top experts in proteomics is hard. Becoming one of the world’s top experts in macroeconomic modelling is hard. But how hard is it to become sufficiently expert in proteomics and macroeconomic modelling that nobody is better than you at both simultaneously? In other words, how hard is it to reach the Pareto frontier?” - Being the (Pareto) Best in the World

The high-dimensionality of skillspace means that reaching the pareto frontier is far more achievable than you expect — you can become the best in the world. Perhaps even more surprisingly, a well-chosen pareto frontier can be reached in months, not years. Doing so isn’t easy, but it is possible.

But what makes for a good pareto frontier?

Choosing a Pareto Frontier

A common strategy for startups is to target a small market with low competition. The market’s small size dissuades participation from incumbents and provides new entrants with the opportunity to insert a wedge. The bet that startups take is that their initial market will grow or that winning it will allow them to break into larger adjacent markets.

This same strategy can be applied to our careers.

Instead of entering a large labor market like consulting, you should identify a small market that you can quickly break into.

There are at least 5 properties that make for a promising pareto frontier:

1. Low competition - If you have a lot of competition, you’re either late or targeting too large of a market.

2. Related to an exponential technology - Technologies moving along exponential curves are the most likely to be important in the future and to face talent shortages, providing unusually high chances for massive returns. Look for exponential scaling curves (AI), adoption curves (crypto), or cost curves (genomics).

3. One of your skills has a zero marginal cost of production - Examples include writing or programming. Having one of these skills allows you to scale as your market scales.

4. You have a natural disposition or interest in it - It’s better to bet on what you are naturally good at or enjoy doing. Personal fit matters.

5. The lack of rate limits - Rate limits are barriers that restrict the speed at which you can grow. These are most commonly found in more mature markets. For example, no matter how hard you work, you cannot become a medical doctor without an MD, which takes years. For the same reason, avoid hierarchies.

Markets with these properties are both comparatively easy to enter and likely to expand. Remember: don’t just climb the hill; let it grow under your feet.

Why Seek the Pareto Frontier?

At the start of their careers, young people face two big problems. First, they’re highly fungible since they haven’t built much unique experience yet. And second, they require years, if not decades, to rise within established hierarchies. Racing to the pareto frontier solves both of these problems. Targeting a small market allows you to build unique experience, providing career defensibility. It also allows you to rise quickly as your market grows, avoiding the rate limits of more traditional career paths.

But what if your market doesn’t actually pan out? In practice, you’ll still end up far ahead. The same work ethic, the same zero marginal cost skill, the same obsession used to reach one pareto frontier is transferable to other career paths too.

Those who can reach one pareto frontier can reach many.

In this sense, even if the targeted market is niche, building a pareto optimal skill set is less risky than it appears. If one’s particular intersection of skills ends up in low demand or not being a strong personal fit, it’s possible to quickly iterate.

So: race to the pareto frontier. Use that unique skill set and experience as your wedge into the talent market which you can build upon. Specialize, then generalize. Don’t “keep your options open.” Pick something, and become the best in the world at it.