You need to obtain data on how realistic and profitable/successful something is before you scale it. Your understanding of what you could do in a certain realm is unreliable. Instead, make a small first step that you are almost guaranteed to make and then continuously increase the bar.
This is a phrase from the Investor’s Podcast that I heard yesterday.
This principle is used in Facebook ads. A bunch of tests are launched because, at this point, I don’t know what actually works. Then, depending on how well a certain ad performs, it’s either scaled or downgraded.
This principle is beneficial in all aspects of life.
With habits, Jeremiah said, “Me today is me tomorrow”. You today is you tomorrow. Meaning the difference between me and my habits today and tomorrow is almost zero unless I am intentionally introducing incremental changes. What I am able to do today is almost the same as what I am able to do tomorrow.
It is a little bit of a paradox.
Today I am who I am.
For tomorrow, I have the vision of who I want to be. Tomorrow becomes today before I know it and I face the reality of being “who I am” again.
So in order to give the “grand vision” a chance, I need to start with something achievable.
So instead of setting the goal of running 5k every day, I set a very achievable guaranteed goal of 1k per day. Then, if it works, I can scale it up a little bit to 1.3k. Nail it before you scale it. I have to master the 1k, meaning be able to consistently run it for couple days to then scale into bigger distances.
I can achieve any goal almost, but not tomorrow. Incrementally, where each small increment is compounded into the ”grand vision”. The growth in this case can be almost infinite, until you reach the carrying capacity of that project/endeavour/physical limitations.
Jeremiah: “Big goals for the long-term. Short goals for incremental progress”
Short-term goals are what we actually operate with on a daily basis. Big goals are more like overall direction of where we want to compound to.
Seems like, small incremental 1% changes are the most reliable way to ensure progress towards certain goals/habits. I assume there are blitzscaling shortcut ways of getting some things done but to a larger extent this principle will definitely be true in some areas of life.
Lastly, this is an image called “Strongest motivator in the world”. It doesn’t relate to scaling that much, more to the idea of incremental changes producing a compound effect. Most often, if we are at 0.99, we are greedy and want to have five right away. Small incremental percentage changes from 0.99 to 1.01 will get us there eventually, even though the initial differences are minimal.
