Effort × Time = Results

Consider the implications of Effort × Time. Or more specifically, what can happen when your work builds on tasks you’ve previously completed.

When you plug away at something slowly and methodically, it’s like earning compound interest: from day to day there’s not much to see, but over the long haul you can work wonders. You add one brick, then another, and another, until one day you look up to find that you’ve built something substantial.

Me, I’ve been studying the prose of business contracts. I started looking into it in 1996, and I’ve kept at it ever since. I’ve always had grand ideas at the back of my mind, but mostly I’ve focused on the next blog post, the next seminar, the next article.

My book A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting is no page turner, and I’m no John Grisham. But with publication of the fourth edition, I find that I’ve built something that’s bigger than me. I now consult the book like any other reader would, as I can’t retain it all. It’s almost as if it were written by some other, more accomplished version of myself.

Staying the course has required a balancing act. My long-term goals allowed me to keep at my short-term tasks without expecting an immediate payoff. But it was just as well that I kept my long-term goals at the back of my mind—if someone had told me at the outset that it would take twenty years of painstakingly incremental work to start achieving those goals, I probably would have quickly found something else to do.

So if you find work that you love, and it’s the sort of work that allows you to build something, and you stick with it, you might be in for a gratifying surprise in, oh, twenty years.