Diminishing returns

I remember when i was playing a videogame that some of the stats the game had were subject to a thing called diminishing returns. It meant that the more you got from that particular stat the less benefit you would get from it. It was there mainly as a way of preventing those stats of being overpowered. The interesting part of this is that diminishing returns are applied to most things in life too.

You may have experienced them while being in school. At the start of it the lessons are easy and a little amount of studying had a massive effect on your grades. As the years were progressing lessons were getting harder and you had study more to maintain the grades. The progression of this process was leading to the point of more work less profit. Another good example of this is exercise. Lets say you decide to get fit by lifting weights. The first times you storm through your workouts and you can see visible results. After some time though ,depending on what program you have , you may hit a wall and remain stagnant without progressing. In order to see a little improvement after that point you have to do work equal to all the things you did until the stall point combined.

So the more professional you become at something the more work you have to do in order to see small improvements. This process doesn't stop until you reach your peak at the thing. The better you become at each thing the improvements you are going to get will be smaller and smaller. You get the drift. This provides us an interesting dilemma: The first choice is knowing where the point from which diminishing returns start and stop there. That way you can have the maximum benefit with minimum effort. With that logic though you can't reach your maximum potential. The second choice is to pass that point and continue grinding until you reach the previously mentioned peak. This requires hard work and determination but also provides personal satisfaction which can't be compared with any other feeling.

From the above I will conclude that it is very important to have the wisdom to choose the “battles” you should fight wisely. The worst thing is to make the wrong choice of working on something that deeply you know that it wont have any meaning when you reach the top.