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Overnight success took a decade
UCLA basketball under John Wooden won 10 NCAA championships in 12 years, and it looks like the team burst into everyone's consciousness all at once. The story had been in progress for well over a decade.
Wooden put in place his approach to running a team, his pyramid of success, the kinds of players he recruited, and the fast break, and he kept improving all of it year after year and game after game. At first it is like pushing a giant heavy flywheel: one slow, creaky turn that nobody pays attention to. Then there are four turns, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and the record improves. At some point it breaks through into a championship that seems to have come out of nowhere.
The most durable results happen as a series of good decisions that accumulate one upon another over a very long period, much like holding quality assets in investing and letting them compound. People think they can jump to the great result by skipping the flywheel.
How long did Wooden take to build UCLA?
Wooden arrived at UCLA in 1948, and the first of the ten championships came in 1964. In between he refined his pyramid of success, which he spent years developing, along with his recruiting and his fast-paced style of play. The ten titles came in 12 seasons, ending in 1975.
Why do compounding results look sudden?
Doubling produces tiny changes at first and enormous ones at the end. On a chessboard, placing one grain of rice on the first square and doubling for each square after it yields more than 18 quintillion grains by the last square. The early squares add so little that the pile seems to appear all at once near the end.
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