The Chinese Bamboo Tree

As the famous parable goes, a Chinese bamboo farmer plants a seed.

Year one: Nothing visible happens.

Year two: Still nothing.

Year three: Not a single shoot breaks the surface.

Year four: The ground remains bare.

For four years, the farmer waters soil with no evidence that anything is growing. His neighbors think he's delusional. His family questions whether he wasted the investment.

Every single day looks like failure.

Then, in year five, the bamboo explodes.

It grows 90 feet in six weeks.

Here's the wrong question everyone asks: "What happened in year five?"

The answer: Nothing special happened in year five.

Everything happened in years one through four but it occurred underground, invisible, difficult to measure.

The bamboo wasn't dormant. It was building a root system so massive and complex that when it finally broke the surface, explosive growth was inevitable.

The parable highlights why consistency is so important when building a business but also why it is so hard to sustain, especially in the beginning.

Why?

Your inputs follow a normal distribution. Day-to-day the differences in inputs are marginal. If you’re consistent, those marginal gains (or losses) add up.

Your outputs follow a power law. Day-to-day results will be nil. Until the one day everything changes.

The Input-Output Mismatch

The input-output distribution mismatch occur in many aspects of life but nowhere as much as in business.

Practically, what does it mean that your inputs follow a normal distribution?

• Week-to-week your work hours are approximately the same.

• You invest roughly the same energy each week.

• You send similar numbers of emails, make comparable numbers of calls, create a predictable volume of content.

What does it mean that your outputs follow a power law distribution?

• 80% of your revenue comes from 20% of your clients.

• One partnership drives more growth than your last 47 combined.

• A single piece of content generates more leads than everything else you've published this year.

This isn't a bug. It's the fundamental mechanism of how value creation works.

The sooner you accept this mismatch, the sooner you stop feeling like you're doing something wrong when six months of work produces modest results, and one breakthrough week changes your entire trajectory.

The Nothing Until Everything Principle

The beginning of every business breakthrough looks identical: nothing is happening.

You're posting content. Nobody's responding. You're doing cold outreach. Crickets. You're building a product. No traction.

This is where 90% of entrepreneurs quit. They interpret the absence of results as evidence they're on the wrong path.

But here's what's actually happening beneath the surface:

Networks are forming. Your name is being mentioned in rooms you'll never see. Someone's bookmarking your article for later. A potential client is watching, not yet ready to buy.

You are also getting better. Whatever reps your putting in are compounding. Maybe the fiftieth sales call lands because you’re that much better than you were on the first.

You're building what I call "potential energy". Like a bolder perched on a high cliff, potential energy is invisible until it converts to kinetic energy.

The transformation from potential to kinetic is when everything can happen at once:

Three clients say yes in the same week. Two partnerships materialize simultaneously. Your product hits some invisible tipping point and goes from 5 to 50 customers overnight.

It feels random. It looks like luck. But it's the predictable result of power law distributions finally expressing themselves.

Nothing happens until everything happens.

How to Operate Inside the Paradox

So how do you actually build a business when inputs are linear but outputs are exponential?

First, optimize for volume over perfection.

If you can't predict which effort creates the breakthrough, your job is to create more efforts. Ship the imperfect post. Send the rough draft proposal. Launch the MVP. Perfection is a liability in a power law world.

Second, build systems that compound.

Not every input is equal. Some give you one chance at a payout. Others create ongoing opportunities. An email subscriber can convert today or three years from now. A piece of evergreen content works while you sleep. Choose inputs that behave like financial options. They may be “out of the money” now but can pay off massively in the future.

Third, track leading indicators, not results.

You can't control when the breakthrough happens, but you can control whether you're creating the conditions for it. Track inputs such as emails sent, content published, conversations started, experiments run. These are your real KPIs.

Fourth, stay in the game long enough.

The only way to guarantee you lose when outcomes follow power law distributions is to quit before they express themselves. Most businesses fail not because their strategy was wrong, but because they stopped playing before their consistent work paid off.

The Next Step

Stop measuring yourself against the wrong standard.

You think: "I put in consistent effort, so I should get consistent results."

Business outcomes are the result of effort, skill and uncertainty. Notice I didn’t call it luck. Uncertainty can manifest as good or bad luck.

Also, effort, skill and uncertainty work together, not independently.

But like the bamboo, much of the early growth is invisible.

Learning a skill that takes months or years to master could ultimately connect you to people important to your success.

Keep showing up. Not because every day matters equally, but because you never know which day changes everything.

Nothing happens until everything happens.

Everything happens when you’re still in the game, showing up like you have every day, week, month and year prior.

My goal with The Leap is to provide you each Saturday with the knowledge, tools and lessons learned to help you get started and keep going toward building your future. 

Whether you are making the leap to startups, solo-entrepreneurship, freelancing, side hustles or other creative ventures, the tools and strategies to succeed in each are similar.