The Shelf Life of 'What Works'

Progress has an interesting balance between sticking to what's simple and repeating what's already worked, versus changing how you're doing things to avoid getting stuck.

This article will focus on the power of changing your approach, a crucial skill for self-development that can ultimately make or break your progress.

The inspiration for this article came from Nick Maggiulli's "The Wealth Ladder," a framework that divides financial success into six distinct levels, each requiring its own strategic focus. The most important lesson is that your approach must change as you climb each rung.

For example, when you are at Level 1 (less than $10,000 net worth) and Level 2 ($10,000 to $100,000 net worth), focusing on complex stock investing is not the most effective strategy. At these stages, your best bet is to focus on foundational activities that have a more significant impact: minimizing expenses, paying off all your debt, and working to increase your income.

The emphasis on portfolio management and advanced investing only becomes the most powerful way to grow your wealth once you’ve reached Level 3 ($100,000 to $1 million net worth). At that point, the compounding power of your investments begins to have a much greater impact on your net worth than your savings rate alone.

While aggressively saving on expenses can be a powerful tool for building wealth at early stages, its impact has diminishing returns as you reach the upper levels. Unless you live an extravagant lifestyle, the financial gains from frugality eventually become marginal. This highlights a crucial lesson: a strategy that served you well at one stage can become a barrier to progress at the next. Sticking to what worked before might lock you out of a new game entirely, as seen in manual labor, where there is a ceiling to how much you can earn by being employed.

The Misery of Adolf Hitler

The saying, "You can't teach an old dog new tricks," serves as a cautionary tale against inflexibility, a flaw whose disastrous consequences are powerfully illustrated by the rise and fall of Adolf Hitler. As the Netflix documentary, "Hitler and the Nazis: Evil on Trial," makes clear, his early triumphs were built on a potent mix of charisma, a divisive ideology, and a bold, uncompromising public persona that captivated many followers.

Adolf Hitler’s first major territorial expansion without significant armed conflict was the Anschluss of Austria in March 1938. Despite the Treaty of Versailles prohibiting a union between Germany and Austria, German troops marched in with little to no resistance from the Austrian military. Many Austrians welcomed the German forces, and the move was met with no military opposition from Britain or France, who opted for a policy of appeasement. This event became a critical test of wills, showing Hitler that the international community was unlikely to fight over his actions.

Hitler was reportedly nervous during this time, aware that a strong military response from countries like Britain could lead to a conflict his still-developing army was not ready to win. The successful and unopposed annexation of Austria reinforced his belief that these nations were unwilling to defend their interests, emboldening him. This non-action from the Western powers was a pivotal moment, paving the way for his subsequent demands and eventual invasion of Czechoslovakia and Poland, which finally ignited World War II.

As the war progressed, Hitler usurped strategic command, viewing himself as more competent than his own generals. His confidence in his military supremacy grew increasingly strong, and this hubris ultimately led to deeper distrust and alienation from his high command and inner circle.

In the final year of the war, Hitler spent the majority of his time in his Berlin bunker. Despite his subordinates' warnings that the war was lost, he remained completely delusional and doubled down on his ideology. His hubris, rooted in early successes, blinded him to the need for a new strategy, making him believe his approach would work indefinitely.

This delusion was most evident on April 29, 1945, when he dictated his final Political Testament to his secretary, Traudl Junge. In this document, he reasserted his belief that he had not started the war, blamed "international Jewry" for the conflict, and even expelled Hermann Göring and Heinrich Himmler from the Nazi Party. As the documentary highlights, this final act showed a complete inability to learn and a desperate attempt to control his narrative until the very end.

I won't spoil the ending for you, but once I saw the documentary, I immediately connected the idea to the book we just discussed. Being unable to change our ways, even when they worked so well for us, can be the end of our existence. While constantly changing what you do, as can be the case with ADHD, can be detrimental, it is not as bad as being unable to learn a new approach.

Lessons From Large Language Models

If you're a Large Language Model developer, you might confront this dilemma more than most, as LLM training requires finding a delicate balance between deterministic, gradient-based learning and introducing a degree of randomness to prevent the model from getting stuck. The goal is to avoid what's known as a local minimum or "plateau" where the model's performance stagnates because the optimization process finds no clear path forward. By strategically adding a small amount of random noise to the weight updates, the model gets a "kick" that can push it out of a flat area and onto a better path, allowing it to continue its search for a more optimal solution in the vast and complex loss landscape. This blend of predictable learning and calculated chaos is essential for building a truly effective model.

LLM training relies fundamentally on probabilistic models, which share some principles with Bayesian statistics. I won't delve into the specifics here, but this connection is crucial to a broader discussion about learning. The potential parallels are particularly interesting because some cognitive scientists argue that the human brain operates on a form of Bayesian inference. By drawing parallels between LLM training and ourselves, we might gain new insights into our own cognitive processes.

To overcome a personal plateau, we often need a catalyst—whether it’s a new book, a mentor, or expert advice. This is crucial because our own arrogance can be a powerful barrier to growth. We must be vigilant about this and, as seen in the case of Hitler, be willing to completely abandon strategies that once brought success when circumstances change.

Thank you for reading.