Most people are solving the wrong equation — the logic behind why some people compound their effort into results while everyone else stays flat is simple, uncomfortable, and almost never talked about

Most people are solving the wrong equation — the logic behind why some people compound their effort into results while everyone else stays flat is simple, uncomfortable, and almost never talked about

In 1963, a physicist and historian of science named Derek J. de Solla Price published a set of lectures delivered at Brookhaven National Laboratory under the title Little Science, Big Science. He had been studying the distribution of scientific output — who published, how much, and who got cited — and he found something that violated his intuitions about how intellectual communities work. The distribution was not a bell curve. It was not even cl…