Have you ever caught yourself thinking, “If I just keep doing a little better, things will improve a little bit,” as if life moves in tidy straight lines? That’s classic linear thinking, and it quietly underestimates how much long term change is possible.
What Linear Thinking Misses
In The Art of Clear Thinking: A Fighter Pilot's Guide to Making Tough Decisions by Hasard Lee, he devotes a whole chapter to linear thinking. He uses examples from jets, business, and everyday decisions to make one core point: things change over time, and they usually don’t change in simple, straight line ways.
Linear thinking says, “If I improve by X now, I’ll get X more later.” Reality often says, “If you keep stacking that improvement, it starts to bend the curve.”
You see this really clearly in money. If you earn 10% on an investment every year, next year’s 10% is based on a bigger base. The growth starts slow, then it accelerates. That’s compounding.
The Same Curve Shows Up In Health
The same idea applies to long-term health.
If you start exercising now, you’re not just “a little fitter” next month. You’re building a body that:
- Handles stress and daily strain better.
- Prevents more injuries as you age.
- Makes future activity easier, which makes it more likely you’ll keep moving.
All of those benefits stack. A tiny bit of strength or mobility in your 30s can mean fewer falls, less pain, and more independence in your 60s and beyond. It’s not a straight line. It’s a curve shaped by years of small choices.
Diet works the same way. Preventing obesity, heart disease, and other issues is much more about patterns over time than any single meal.
It’s a lot easier to go in moderation, enjoy the things you want in sensible amounts, and keep your system relatively stable than it is to live however you want for decades and then try to completely cut all “bad” stuff later when it’s already caused damage.
Skills And Learning Compound Too
This non-linear pattern shows up in skills and learning.
The first few hours of practice feel clumsy. The next set of hours feel slightly better. But as you keep going, things click faster. You connect ideas more easily. You reuse patterns you’ve already built.
By the time you’ve put in steady effort for months or years, you’re not just “X hours better.” You’re someone whose brain has rewired around that skill. You see opportunities, solve problems, and think differently.
Linear thinking says, “One practice session is worth one unit of progress.” Compounding says, “One practice session makes every future session slightly more valuable.”
Connect This To Present Bias
I’ve written before about present bias, the tendency to choose what feels good now over what’s better for future you. When you combine present bias with linear thinking, long-term health and long-term goals get hit twice.
- Present bias says, “The future benefits are fuzzy. This cookie or this couch time is real.”
- Linear thinking says, “Skipping one walk or one healthy meal doesn’t change much.”
Together, they make it very easy to delay small helpful actions and very hard to see how much those actions would matter if you repeated them.
The fix isn’t to become perfectly rational. It’s to remember that:
- Little steps now can compound into big rewards.
- The curve of long-term health and happiness is shaped more by your patterns than your dramatic moments.
If you aim for small positive changes today, even ones that look almost trivial, you’re not just nudging the next week. You’re nudging the next decade.
I’m trying to think less in terms of “Does this matter tomorrow?” and more in terms of “What curve am I drawing for myself over the next few years?” It’s a simple way to push back on linear thinking and present bias at the same time.