Can Exponential Growth be Produced with Logarithmic Engineering Talent?

David Brooks has a wonderful column in the New York Times - The Structures of Growth.  Engineering is one of the exponential professions - you have to work very hard for years at mastering the fundamentals, and you barely see any return.  But then, after 10,000 hours of effort, suddenly you develop a natural ease and your progress multiplies quickly.  You begin to internalize the structures of the field and hopefully you will begin to play creatively with the concepts.  The last thing you want in your career is a logarithmic curve - one where you make a lot of progress when you first begin engineering, but it gets harder and harder to improve. As Tyler Cowen has pointed out, the Era of Average is Over is upon us and if you are thinking in terms of logs versus exponents - the Great Reset in the global labor markets will kill you.