Brute force through sheer effort can only be the way to escape velocity in terms of breaking through inertia.
To be more precise, when one is entrenched in stagnation and wants to move into exponential growth.
Arguably, this could and is usually understood as taking condensed effort within a relatively short amount of time. My mind goes to super cars that go from 0 mph to 60 in 2.6 seconds like a Porsche 911 Turbo S.
Nice, superfast, leaving everything in the dust.
In the face of resistance, it is an applicable way to get unstuck.
Hidden Oppo-too-nity
There's this thing called "time windows" where achieving a particular outcome is way easier within said time frame than any other time period.
Maybe the easiest to understand example of this is market cycles, specifically bull seasons and bear seasons.
Like market cycles, people can be "aware" of these time windows via pattern recognition but yet not be able to take full advantage of it. There's much more art to these seasons than just the science of understanding what they are.
For bear seasons, I think the achieving a particular outcome part is accumulating as much as possible of the assets one views as undervalued.
I'm tempted to write what the MARKET views as undervalued but oh well, can't tell how that looks like in practice or is factually correct. Is it like these crypto projects that a making good revenue/cashflow but their token is stuck in the stagnation zone?
At the same time, cut losses on the positions that aren't coming back. This is a time when the tide goes out and you discover all those who were swimming naked, so to speak.
An interesting parallel here is bear seasons in markets mirror personal low points. When everything feels heavy and hard, that's actually an accumulation phase in disguise.
You're building skills nobody sees, making connections that seem pointless, doing work that feels thankless.
The winners are the ones who recognize that grinding when it sucks is how you load up for the next bull run.
Two Speeds
Back to escape velocity, the sheer effort can also be understood as taking consistent and focused action to build momentum over time that eventually blasts through the ceiling.
This latter approach is harder to achieve without a stall in momentum.
Through quantity, quality is achieved. But the quality of the quantity can be so bad in the beginning that you just have to trust the process and hope better quality will eventually surface out of the iterative repetition.
What's tricky and common to observe but also experience is most people try one method or the other.
The sprint (condensed explosive effort) or the marathon (steady consistent building).
Knowing which season you're in and which approach fits that season is the real insight here.
Personally, my framework for during personal bear market is the marathon approach dominates. It just makes a lot of sense that when you're unknown, broke, inexperienced, or stuck you can't sprint your way to credibility.
For the most part, what you do instead is have to show up daily, put in the reps, and stack tiny wins until the weight of your consistency becomes undeniable.
An arduous long worthwhile journey for the process itself even when the outcome is unexpected, either for good or bad.
When doors are opening, momentum is building, opportunities are multiplying, that's the moment a sprint approach pays off.
Since you're already moving at snowball speed now, double down, maybe cut sleep, take meetings, say yes to everything strategic.
You ride the wave as hard as you can because you know this window won't stay open forever.
Eventually the window closes off, the cycle more or less repeats itself, back to the lows again. Hopefully this time around, it's a higher low.
Thanks for reading!! Share your thoughts below on the comments.