It is an extremely valid perspective to take if you want to consider how likely it is you can grow to a certain percentage of your starting measurements.
In my spreadsheets of Size’s db, I could see that only 48% of guys ever made a second entry. You can’t assume much more about them because it could be they tried and never grew, or more likely, never established a routine and persisted. If you throw those out, the following breakdown is revealed:
Length
growth| population
0.0% |100.0%
2.5% | 84.3%
5.0% | 71.2%
7.5% | 60.0%
10.0% | 47.5%
15.0% | 30.0%
17.5% | 22.5%
20.0% | 15.4%
25.0% | 8.8%
30.0% | 5.4%
40.0% | 1.5%
51.5% | 0.5%
55.0% | 0.4% (one guy)
63.6% | 0.3% (one guy)
64.8% | 0.2% (one guy)
70.0% | 0.1% (one guy)
77.8% | 0.0% (one guy)
Girth
growth| population
0.0% |100.0%
2.5% | 66.6%
5.0% | 48.2%
7.5% | 36.1%
10.0% | 24.0%
15.0% | 13.9%
20.0% | 5.3%
30.0% | 2.2%
40.0% | 0.9%
50.0% | 0.3%
60.7% | 0.2% (one guy)
61.1% | 0.1% (one guy)
83.3% | 0.0% (one guy)
volume
growth | population
0.0% |100.0%
5.0% | 83.0%
10.0% | 72.5%
20.0% | 53.2%
30.0% | 36.4%
40.0% | 24.0%
50.0% | 16.6%
60.0% | 10.3%
70.0% | 7.3%
80.0% | 5.3%
90.0% | 4.3%
100.0% | 3.3%
125.0% | 2.0%
175.0% | 1.0%
178.0% | 0.9% (one guy)
190.9% | 0.8% (one guy)
215.4% | 0.7% (one guy)
221.4% | 0.6% (one guy)
221.4% | 0.5% (one guy)
227.7% | 0.4% (one guy)
240.9% | 0.3% (one guy)
302.3% | 0.2% (one guy)
303.3% | 0.1% (one guy)
359.2% | 0.0% (one guy)
Note that I didn’t provide an even distribution for growth - I just tired to make the information a little more revealing where it gets more dense. This is also two year old data.
The way I liked to read this, is that if I can work as smart and hard as half of these 1000 guys, I can probably gain 10% length, 5% girth and 20% volume. I’ve already met those milestones, so that tells me everything I get beyond this is likely to be hard won.
You can make a lot of assumptions (and test many of them) about the larger populations, but you can see how increasingly unlikely it becomes to gain beyond a certain point. So, I cap my “realistic” ambitions at the top quartile (17.5% length, 10% girth, 40% volume). I hope to reach those in 6 months or so. I can still dream beyond that, though…