In terms of having the motivation to take action, incremental progress is usually not favoured over potentially transformative progress which is similar to going from zero to 1. The latter gives one the impression of undertaking a worthwhile endeavor.
Hidden underneath this preference could well be an inability to finish what one has started for reasons both within and without their control.
Personally, I tend to view incremental progress as the lowest hanging fruit that I can take and be on my way towards something tangible.
By definition, they're not hard to solve for, just find the next logical step and reverse engineer how to get there, although the effort to outcome ratio is nearly even, I'd take it any day over stagnation as a baseline approach.
A swift divorce
As of late however, my mindset is gradually shifting out of being okay with incremental progress as a baseline.
I'm trying to attribute the culprit to the world moving so fast making such kind of progress almost obsolete in terms of not moving the needle.
But then, there's also an element of being aware of having my expectations divorced from reality, the latter couldn't keep up anymore so it filed for a swift divorce, so to speak.
On a serious note, what I meant by that is the timeline of progress, irrespective of which type, has compressed dramatically.
Perhaps, a relatable example is in the world of investing, split between two camps, one aiming for growth and the other for passive dividend income.
Modern investing
For the latter, the math usually tends to work something like owning a portfolio of blue-chip dividend stocks yielding 3-4% annually. Each quarter, dividends arrive like clockwork and one can calculate exactly what they'll earn, reinvest systematically, and watch their position grow predictably. Over 30 years, compounding does its work. Easy peasy. It's the epitome of incremental progress, measurable, reliable, relatively safe.
With the former, you'll have someone like a speculative investor putting the same capital on liquidity narrative cycles.
Although not necessarily, the outcome is often perceived as binary, either spectacular returns (10x, 50x, 100x) or significant loss. Most importantly, the timeline collapses from decades to years or months.
I'm of the opinion that the dividend route is functionally obsolete for wealth creation at this point in time and the growth seeking gambit has more of a survivalist imperative attached to it.
The squeeze that's no longer worth it in this context is the enormous input of time and patience for an output that feels almost trivial against the backdrop of how quickly fortunes are now made and lost.
I'd also add that a counter narrative suggesting the 'virtuous' path is not getting in the modern investing arena is often just a coping mechanism for risk aversion.
Patience as a virtue has been stress-tested to its breaking point. Specifically within this gap between wisdom and reality. Show up consistently, make small improvements, compound over time. And mathematically, this works.
But it assumes the environment remains stable enough for compounding to matter, and that you're operating in a domain where returns are linear.
In power-law domains, steady progress gets you lapped by those who made asymmetric bets.
I guess incrementalism is a tool that needs to be siloed. It's a methodology that could be reserved for domains where they genuinely compound (skills, relationships, health) while recognizing that in beyond those the game has fundamentally changed and the lowest hanging fruits are not nutritious enough to sustain you.
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