事业 · 创业者自述
保罗·格雷厄姆：超线性回报·第1则
保罗·格雷厄姆《《超线性回报》》· Superlinear Returns · 领导 · 财富 · 认知
One of the most important things I didn't understand about the world when I was a child is the degree to which the returns for performance are superlinear. Teachers and coaches implicitly told us the returns were linear. "You get out," I heard a thousand times, "what you put in." They meant well, but this is rarely true. If your product is only half as good as your competitor's, you don't get half as many customers. You get no customers, and you go out of business. It's obviously true that the returns for performance are superlinear in business. Some think this is a flaw of capitalism, and that if we changed the rules it would stop being true. But superlinear returns for performance are a feature of the world, not an artifact of rules we've invented.
出处：
https://paulgraham.com/superlinear.html
定位：Essay, additional excerpt 1 · 核对日期：2026-10-19 · 核验：短摘录
白话
小时候我们常听“一分耕耘一分收获”，以为回报是线性的。但现实往往不是这样：表现带来的回报常常是超线性的，好一点可能好很多，差一点可能全盘皆输。比如你的产品只有对手一半好，你并不会得到一半客户，而是一个客户都没有，直接出局。这不是资本主义的缺陷，而是世界本身的特性。所以做事不能只求“差不多”，要力争做到顶尖，因为微小的优势可能带来巨大的回报。
上下文
保罗·格雷厄姆是硅谷创业教父，他在文章中指出，人们对回报的线性直觉是错误的，超线性回报才是常态。
今日一问
你目前投入的事情，是满足于“及格”，还是在追求“卓越”？
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