Lindy Compounding

Settle new ground but don’t hop

Everyone focuses on the second part of this principle (“the new”) and not enough on the first: “specialize.” Settle new ground, but don’t hop.

What is the lindy effect?

You may be familiar with the “lindy effect,” which is the idea that the future life expectancy of a thing is proportional to its current age. This is commonly expressed as something negative. If someone tells you their project will be late by ten days, you can expect it to take another ten days from that, and so on.

It isn’t meant to be taken literally— since nothing lasts forever— but it does describe the tendency of deviations to correlate rather than remain independent.

📝 Side note: In econometrics, this is known as Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity.

Positive aspect

However, the idea also applies positively. In his book Antifragile, Taleb notes that if something has remained relevant for fifty years, it can be expected to remain relevant for another fifty more.

We can also apply this concept to the way that we specialize in the new: