Superlinear returns reduce to two fundamental causes: exponential growth and thresholds. Crossing thresholds leads to exponential growth (the winning side suffers less damage and is more likely to win again), and exponential growth helps you cross thresholds (network effects shut competitors out). The two reinforce each other almost everywhere they appear.

Excluding sports, politics, and fame, the fields with a few big winners — science, art, music, writing, math, investing, starting companies — are exactly the fields where you must be independent-minded to succeed. Your ideas have to be not just correct, but novel. Conventional-minded people literally can't imagine having novel ideas, so they attribute the resulting inequality to cheating.

Work compounds in two ways: directly (building infrastructure, audience, brand) or by teaching you, since learning compounds. This is why Silicon Valley tolerates failure — not blindly, but because a founder who learned from a failed company is still on an exponential curve even if the company wasn't.

If you come across something mediocre yet still popular, it could be a good idea to replace it — people who dislike a product but still buy it would buy a better alternative. But be careful: when something is popular despite being mediocre, there's often a hidden reason (monopoly, regulation, bad taste, broken buying procedures) that explains why no one has displaced it.

Exposing yourself to superlinear returns is not for everyone. Most people will be better off as part of the pool. It makes sense for two types: those who know they're so good they'll be net ahead in a high-variation world, and the young, who can afford to risk trying it to find out.

Promising research problems tend to seem mystifying but unimportant — if they were mystifying and obviously important, they'd already be famous open questions with crowds working on them. The heuristic: be driven by curiosity rather than careerism. Ambition makes you climb existing peaks; curiosity may grow a mountain beneath you.

Don't equate work with a job. To a writer, artist, or scientist, "your work" is whatever they're currently studying or creating — something they carry from job to job. It may be done for an employer, but it's part of their portfolio.