I Think My Life Is a Percolation Process

 For a long time, I believed progress was mostly linear.

Study harder, improve a little.

Work longer, achieve a little more.

Write one article, gain a few more readers.

But increasingly, I think life works differently.

It may be closer to a percolation process.

In percolation theory, isolated points or clusters remain disconnected for a long time. You can keep adding new connections, yet nothing dramatic seems to happen.

Then, at a critical threshold, something changes.

Separate clusters suddenly connect.

A path emerges across the entire system.

What looked like random accumulation becomes a network.

I have been thinking about this a lot lately.

My background in electrical engineering once seemed separate from medicine.

My experience as a futures and options system trader seemed separate from becoming an ophthalmologist.

My interest in investing seemed separate from artificial intelligence.

My medical writing seemed separate from social media.

My blog seemed separate from LinkedIn.

LinkedIn seemed separate from Threads.

For years, these were isolated clusters.

But recently, I have started to see connections forming.

Engineering influences how I think as a physician.

Trading shaped how I understand uncertainty and probability.

Medicine gives me real-world problems worth solving.

Investing taught me to think in decades and trust compounding.

AI helps me organize, challenge, and distribute knowledge.

Writing turns experience into an archive.

And different platforms are beginning to connect people, ideas, and knowledge in ways I did not fully plan.

A reader finds me on Threads and visits my blog.

Another person discovers my writing and connects with me on LinkedIn.

An old article suddenly becomes relevant again because of a new conversation elsewhere.

Individually, these events look small.

One article.

One comment.

One connection.

One follower.

One brick a day.

But perhaps that is how percolation begins.

The difficult part is that before the threshold is reached, progress can look almost invisible.

You keep adding nodes.

You keep building connections.

You keep showing up.

And for a long time, nothing seems to happen.

Then one day, the system starts connecting itself.

I do not know where my own threshold is.

But I increasingly believe that many meaningful changes in life are not linear.

They are accumulated quietly, below the surface, until enough connections exist for something new to emerge.

That is why I keep writing.

That is why I keep learning.

That is why I believe in consistency, systems, and compounding.

One brick a day may not look like much.

Until the bricks connect.

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