Pillar 3 - The Philosophy
You Must Sweat The Small Stuff
This law is all about making incremental progress in order to achieve great things. It comes down to the fact that if you do a lot of small things, you will have a achieved a large thing. This is inline with the Japanese philosophy of kaizen, which is all about not making big leaps forwards, but rather making small things better, in small ways, everywhere you can. One key way to promote this philosophy is to promote innovation at all levels of your organisation. This small scale experimentation is often easier to implement and easier to scale across a large company when compared to a big change.
Things that are easy to do are also the easiest not to do
The ideas that are generated by your team, must not be accepted or rejected, instead they must be fostered and guided towards success. This means that the idea generators maintain ownership and are given guidance to help bring ideas to fruition.
By sweating the small stuff, you will "Out-care the competition", which will lead to incremental improvement and brand awareness.
A Small Miss Now Creates A Big Mess Later
This chapter is all about long term thinking. Not taking shortcuts for an easier today, but instead investing in your future success. Tiger Woods is a great example of this. When he started winning, he could see that he was limited by his swing and asked his coach to help him start from scratch to improve it. He was warned that his game would get a lot worse before it got better. Knowing it would pay off in the long run, he took the risk and after losing consecutively, the change paid off and he won a record 6 straight wons and become one of the best golfers ever.
Pursuit of perfection is a matter of discipline, not heroism
Small deviations from the optimal path is amplified overtime and distance. This is something well know by navigators. They call it the 1 in 60 rule. For every 1 degree you are off from your target, you will end up 1 mile away from your target for every 60 miles travelled. The same is true in life, even a slight deviation early on, can put us significantly off course if we don't correct our course. Ultimatley, life is all about reviewing our position and correcting our course as we go, across all aspects of life. This makes sure we don't stray too far from our destination.
The smallest seeds of today's negligence will bloom into tomorrow's biggest regrets.
You Must Out Fail The Competition
When we hear the word failure, we often have a negative emotion associated with it. However, Stephen argues that we aren't failing enough, which is a sign of a lack of experimentation. The more we experiment and test, the more we learn and the closer we get to the right answer. Therefore, the higher your failure rate, the higher your chances of success. I love this idea that to invent, you have to experiment and "Failure and invention are inseparable twins".
"Whenever a business decides that success has been attained, progress stops" - Thomas J Watson, IBM
If you are given a 10% chance of a 100x payoff, you should take the bet, even if you are wrong 9/10. This is ultimatley what good experimentation is and it reminds me of the concepts talked about in the power law.
A great example of failure and experimentation is Amazon. AWS (Amazon Web Services) started as an unrelated experiment, now 20 years later, it is their biggest contributor to Amazon's profit. Jeff Bezos talks about how he makes these high stakes decisions and breaks them down into two categories:
Type 1 decisions - One way door, you can't come back. These need thought and deliberation
Type 2 decisions - Two way doors, reversible decisions. These should be made quickly - low risk which can be delegated to lower teams and individuals.
We can often get caught up thinking about the "what ifs", but perfect decisions only exist in hindsight. To avoid this decision paralysis, get to 51% certainty and then make the decision. This will speed up your decision making process and help you to fail more and fail faster.
I think this idea of creating a pro-failure environment is so important so I summarised the books key tips:
Remove bureaucracy - Make teams as small as possible and give them more authority when it comes to type 2 decisions.
Fix incentives - often "misaligned incentives'', where the company expects X,Y,Z but incentivises other behaviours. Human behaviour is driven by incentives, evidence and examples, not slogans and wishful thinking.
Promote and Fire - Promote the people who are trying and failing the most. This will set an example. If you make these people managers, they will foster a greater culture of failing. Influence trickles down. The highest people in the company need to be the most avid disciples of the company values. Remove those that stand in the way of failure.
Measure accurately - Make and communicate a clear process. Measure failure rate by team and make increased failure a KPI.
Share the failure - Share the learnings with all teams to prevent duplication of an unsuccessful thesis and stimulate new ideas.
You Must Become A Plan A Thinker
Researcher has shown that having a plan B in any ambition has a net negative impact on your chances of succeeding at Plan A. This is because you have a safety net and therefore you aren't faced with an easy option. Fear of failure can actually provide the impetus needed for you to succeed. However, being risky doesn't mean being reckless. You should have a clear vision and go all in on your plan A.
Don't Be An Ostrich
This law is underpinned by the Ostrich effect. Just like how ostriches bury their heads in the sand when they sense danger, when dealing with difficult situations or information, we avoid it. When this effect kicks in, we don't just have anxiety, anxiety has us and presses us to avert our gaze from the thing making us anxious.
In business, the person with the fewest blind spots stands the greatest chance of victory. Therefore we must face the things that are making us anxious so that we can overcome them. We are motivated not by pleasure, but by avoiding discomfort, but sometimes the greatest things lie on the other side of discomfort.
The pain we create by trying to avoid pain is avoidable
You Must Make Pressure Your Privilege
If you feel pressure, it means you are in a very special circumstance. The basics are already accounted for and the pressure you feel is aspirational pressure. You must realise that this pressure is a privilege and that it only comes to those who earn it. It is this pressure that will drive you to do great things. Never view pressure or the stress it creates as harmful, for it is our relationship, perspective and evaluation of pressure and the stress it creates that is powerful. Instead, view stress as a positive response, priming your body to perform. Reframing it in this way will create a more positive relationship with healthy stress.
Them most meaningful challenges in life will come with a "few dark nights on the side of Everest"
When things get tough always remind yourself of the privilege of aspirational pressure
The Power Of Negative Manifestation
When starting out it is a valuable exercise to ask yourself a pivotal question: "Why will this idea fail?". When most startups fail, the founders suddenly see the obvious reason as to why it failed. This does need to be something that occurs in hindsight. Instead, asking this question early on will allow you to work through the potential issues early and pivot early if necessary.
So, what is the best way to go about this? Use the pre-mortem method. Instead of waiting for failure to conduct a post-mortem, visualise failure occurring and work backwards to find the root cause. The process can be broken down into the following steps:
Set the Stage - Bring your team together and make it a space that people feel like they can voice their opinions
Fast Forward to Failure - Get everyone to visualise project/company failure in vivid detail
Brainstorm Reasons for Failure - Independent exercise based on that person's visualisation (to avoid groupthink)
Share and Discuss - Non-judgmental forum where everyone presents their findings
Develop Contingency Plans - Work together to mitigate the risks you discussed
You can do this across all decisions in life, from business, to career choice to investment, to relationships. Think about failure early, so you can be proactive and mitigate the risks.
Your Skills Are Worthless But Your Context Is Valuable
Different markets place different values on particular skills. If you are a chemist in a pharmaceutical field, where there are already a lot of chemists, you skills may be valued less than in a battery manufacturer, where traditionally less chemists end up. For this reason, your context is very valuable. You need to find the context/industry that will value your skillset the most. Look at what other industries may value your skillset because chances are, they would be willing to pay a lot more.
The Discipline Equation
It was this concept in the book that shook me the most. It really puts into perspective just how little time we have in this life. For me, this is a huge driving factor, motivating me to do things now, so that I don't live in regret. I think this graphic helps you embrace your mortality and prioritise what truly matters.
I think it also highlights that the allocation of our time is the centre point of our influence. It is the one thing that we have the choice over everyday. What we do with our time. All of us play the roulette wheel of life, where you bet away your hours on certain tasks and only get rewarded for those that improve your health. Focus on the things that you want to do and that your future self will thank you for, instead of wasting your time living up to someone else's expectations.
Stephen defines discipline so perfectly. "Discipline is the ongoing commitment to pursuing a goal, independent of fluctuating motivation". But what contributes to discipline?
Discipline = The Value of the Goal + Reward of Pursuit - Cost of Pursuit
I have talked previously about the importance of visualisation in achieving goals. This equation really cements this idea because visualisation helps the perceived value of the goal go up and therefore we are more disciplined.
So, what are some practical ways to increase your discipline:
gamify the pursuit to make it more rewarding - You could start an accountability circles with friends so that there is reward/consequence for your discipline.
remove any factor that will add psychological cost - make it more accessible and reduce friction. For example, if you are trying to floss everyday, don't have your floss hiding in a draw, keep it out near your toothbrush so you see it every time you brush.
Thanks for reading, if you got something out of this, please consider following and subscribing to my newsletter. See you next week for pillar 4!
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