Seeing as it’s still quite early in 2025, the review that I undertook at the end of last year is still quite fresh in my mind.

There were a few ideas that dominated this review, and I’ve talked about one of them already in connecting with people to share and deepen satisfaction and experiences (in issues 058 and 082), but today I want to talk about another.

And this one might be the most important of all…

Throughout thinking about what brought me genuine feelings of satisfaction and accomplishment, the focus again and again swung around to point broadly at one category of things being responsible almost every time. That thing was simply investing in an action and activity in the long-term.

It didn’t matter where I looked - this held with making an effort in the same friendships that I’d been keeping over a long time, training in the gym, which I started over seven years ago, taking photographs, which I’ve done for even longer, or writing online at a regular cadence since the start of 2023, resulting in starting an online business.

Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of things that I do that as one-offs that I still very much value, but the magic of compounding is how relatively normal things can become extraordinarily valuable when more time and effort are poured into them.

There is a place for both, but the investments in regular habits and activities are more often overlooked. And although most of them are free or low-cost, they cost significant amounts in terms of time and attention, so the takeaways are two-fold:

  • Don’t get caught up in sinking energy, time and money into the things that you don’t think you’re going to repeat regularly. It’s better to keep doing the same things over and over again so you know what to expect with your emotional state and can continue to build value and progress exponentially.
  • And because of the inherent time and attention cost of doing a thing a lot for a long time, you have no choice but to be selective and to stick with your selections. I’ve talked about this in the past in various contexts - sticking with the same app, working on the same thing and repeated writing are all examples.

One thing to note - if you’ve chosen the wrong things to focus on then beware because you’re going to dig your way into a position that’s going become increasingly harder to dig out of when you finally realise you’re playing a game that you don’t want to be playing.

Don’t overthink when it comes to this choice though; the best options are normally the things you’d tend towards if you were left alone with no distraction anyway.

You’ve likely been doing these things for years anyway because they’re what you come back to by default. They’re the path of least resistance. And resistance is the last thing you need if the goal is to keep showing up over months and years. So take this as a sign to put more effort into your creative passions - the things you do because you like how putting something new into the world makes you feel

The compounding effect takes control if you can find these things worth sticking with. Even with a very average starting level of skill, you can build a practice or outcome that people very much admire, merely because you’ve been punching the clock and keeping your head clear of other distractions.

The more time and consistency you put into something, the more you get out through exponential gains; it’s true up until it’s not – but getting to this point is rare, and a whole other issue that I could write in the future if I choose to.

So I’ll leave you there for now. Thanks as always for reading, and I hope you’re enjoying the new setup I’ve put together for Fundamentalised!

— Theo


Last week’s issue (extended cut)…

Read the issue - 083 • Another Fundamentalised website (the last one, I promise)

Trying to put some words on this new website that I’ve built. It was not easy for some reason, maybe because my mind has already moved on to the upcoming exam for university in a little less than a week’s time. But I’m making a longer, more detailed video about this at some point, and will let you know when that’s out.


What I wrote this week (last week, actually)

Improve Your Knowledge Management by Building These Two Traits - My first Medium article in a while (sometimes I feel as though there’s a finite way to teach the same lessons), talking about the couple of characteristics that really stand out to me as important when building a note-taking and knowledge management practice.

This piece of work very much inspired this one actually, as good knowledge management is something I’m very grateful to have invested in at an early time.