Make your success inevitable

Each tick is one hour. Leaves turn sunlight into energy. Energy grows branches, more leaves, and fruit. Ripe fruit falls, drifts with the wind, and lands as a seed. Nobody plans this forest. It follows the incentives.

Light is the reward. A tree in the sun grows. A tree in the shade starves, drops its leaves, and dies.
Success pays for more success. More leaves catch more light, and more light grows more leaves. Growth compounds.
The winners make the next generation. Only a tree with energy to spare grows fruit. So every seed comes from a tree that found the light.
Crowding limits everyone. A seed sprouts only on open, wet, sunlit ground. A big canopy shades out its own seedlings, so the forest rises and falls by itself.
Rain sets the pace. A tree needs wet ground to grow. The clouds drift with the wind and rain where they are.

Find the incentive /ɪnˈsɛntɪv/ in-SEN-tiv A reward or a penalty that moves a person to act. When the incentive changes, the behaviour changes. Read the article → that points at your goal, and let the system do the work. The fantastic phenomenon of incentives shows the same idea with simple dots.

Run this simulation in your terminal:

curl -s https://www.dallasread.com/principles/progress/trees.js | node