The 85% rule, being consistently good, and a couple of principles for success.
How many times have you heard someone say, "Now if I had a crystal ball, I'd be super rich"? What would you do if you had a crystal ball? Would you be bored? Lazy?
Isn't the struggle part of reward for figuring work out? I recognize that it is a privilege to write this. Those struggling to put food on the table for tonight's dinner certainly aren't enjoying the struggle. They simply need food. Goes back to Maslow's hierarchy of needs. There's too much poverty in the richest nations, particularly this one.
When you need food and shelter, little else matters. You're focused on solving for that. Not dreaming about your work portfolio. Then again, those reading this letter, likely have that handled.
Win by consistently being good
Most of us don't know how rich we really are. Myself included. Read the news and you might notice the American Dream is more and more elusive. That those below the 1% have been sold a bill of goods designed to prop up the 1%. Scan the web and you'll find infinite products touting quick paths to riches. But unless you're damn lucky, it's on you. It's on me. I'm talking about achieving the financial independence Own The Cow is all about.
I don't profess to be the expert. I haven't 'made it'. And I'm not going to get rich selling you on the promise of 'making it'. That's for those who have actually made it and can share their journey. They've done the work. They have the social proof and credibility.
"Live as if you were living a second time, and as though you had acted wrongly the first time." - Viktor Frankl
Yet their journey is not yours. Nor mine. Each of us will experience the same thing differently. What I share, is my journey. The thoughts contained within reflect how I'm approaching this.
My number one tool is my mind and mindset. Part of the impetus in starting OTC is to tease out what works and what doesn't out in the open. With you. It forces ME to do the work. Each week I feel a commitment to ship.
It sharpens my thinking by forcing me to distill the concepts I'm exploring concisely. Otherwise they're just concepts. This is how the rubber hits the road and I build my personal fly wheel.
If you want to fix a saggy bum, you need to invest a lot of time doing specific exercises that work those muscles combined with optimizing your diet. That's time consistently showing up and doing the work. You can't think your way there. You gotta get sweaty.
Most people say you need to give it 100%. Or 110%. You need to burn the midnight oil. Sacrifice sleep and so much more to get the work done. And then you'll get successful. Not so fast. It may be sustainable for Elon Musk, but for us mere mortals, there's a better path to greatness. I've long believed in a discipline for execution. But these two concepts nail the point.
In an interview with Tim Ferris, Hugh Jackman talked about giving it 85%. This is the notion that by operating at 85% of your capacity you'll accomplish more:
"If you tell most of A-type athletes to run at their 85% capacity, they will run faster than if you tell them to run at 100%, because it's more about relaxation, and form, and optimizing the muscles in the right way".
A sprint coach first identified this concept by noticing how Carl Lewis won by not being the fastest out of the gate. In fact, by watching head-on videos of races he saw that he never changed his stride throughout the race yet won by being consistent and relaxed. His face never got contorted towards the finish as most do when they go all out. At 85%. At this level, you sustain your momentum, avoid burnout.
Tim connects how this applies to whatever you do. You could say this proves the maxim that "slow and steady wins the race."
Along these lines is a must read from Steph Smith on how the key to being great is to simply be good. Over and over and over.
"...being 'great' not about being better than someone else. It is about being dependable and disciplined, and ultimately it is earned."
Consistency is hard. It eludes most of us because we get distracted. New year's resolutions anyone?
Consistency requires focus. If you're trying to be an entrepreneur, and every week you launch into a new idea, success will elude you. You might be consistent at the idea game, but miss the execution. Get consistent at what you're good at. Identify your core superpower and double down on that.
Through consistency you get good. You outlast everyone else who gives up.
Polina Marinova profiles interesting people. She's an example of someone who consistently delivers week after week. She earned her readers' trust by delivering The Profile every single week for three years before leaving her job a Fortune to work on it full time and asking people to pay for it. She's getting to great by being consistently good.
Why this resonates so strongly with me is that we're not built to run at 8000 RPMs for long. Just like your car's engine will go kaput so will you. But you can drive all days at 4000 RPM and proper fuel.
Are you an entrepreneur or business person?
Jim McKelvey, co-founder of Square explains the difference better than anyone I know. A business person is good at taking a proven business model and niche and replicating it.
They can assess based on past performance whether there's opportunity and what that might be. An entreprenuer is forging an uncharted path. It's not proven. And success isn't certain. Failure is an option.
Which one are you? I know that based on this definition I'm a business person. Hat tip to Polina for her interview with Jim.
Consistency requires resilience. But there's something better: Antifragility
I read Nassim Taleb's book, Antifragile several years ago and recently revisited it. For those who don't know, he's also the author of The Black Swan, which is about rare and unpredictable events. (COVID is not a black swan).
Resilience is essential because it helps us get back up again and again. Resilience helps us be consistent and good. Being antifragile means we're better at managing what we don't know. Or can't know. The natural world is antifragile. It uses random events to rebuild and change course. It taps into unpredictability. In other words, it takes advantage of random events.
"Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure , risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it antifragile. Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better. "
Our quest for optimization reduces redundancy and randomness and thus makes us more fragile Nassim posits. None of us can actually be antifragile, but we can increase our strength and reduce our fragility. It isn't an either-or but a continuum. By reducing the chance of random events, we don't learn. We expect predictability and when something doesn't conform, it throws us off course. If we expect things we cannot predict, than we won't be as surprised and will have a larger tool box to address such events.
"The antifragile loves randomness and uncertainty, which also means— crucially—a love of errors, a certain class of errors. Antifragility has a singular property of allowing us to deal with the unknown, to do things without understanding them— and do them well. Let me be more aggressive: we are largely better at doing than we are at thinking, thanks to antifragility. I’d rather be dumb and antifragile than extremely smart and fragile, any time.
Antifragility makes us understand fragility better. Just as we cannot improve health without reducing disease, or increase wealth without first decreasing losses, antifragility and fragility are degrees on a spectrum."
"Man-made complex systems tend to develop cascades and runaway chains of reactions that decrease, even eliminate, predictability and cause outsized events. So the modern world may be increasing in technological knowledge, but, paradoxically, it is making things a lot more unpredictable."
Find success through the star principle
Now that you have the keys to greatness managing the unmanageable, it's wise to aim squarely at what's going to get you outsized results. Which brings me to the 80/20 principle. This came out of another interview with Richard Koch on how he picks winning investments. My interest piqued, I'm diving into two of his books, The Star Principle and The 80/20 principle, which he's responsible for coining a principle rather than a rule. We often talk about how the majority of your results come from 20 percent of your effort. Or how 20% of the sales people in a company deliver 80% of the sales, etc.
For me, the 80/20 principle has been so commonly bantered about that I haven't thought too deeply about it. You can apply this to many areas of life. It makes sense to understand what gives you most of your results and pleasure, than double down on that and delegate the things that don't. Or figure out how to minimize your time in those things through automation or even reducing the need to do them.
When it comes to investing, Richard looks for companies that have the potential to be stars. Those that have the ability to be leaders in their niche with 30% plus growth potential. And that cannot be easily disrupted.
How this applies to you: As you think about where you can achieve your highest potential, think about potential growth rates in both your job, side hustle or full self employment.
If you're a business person, what business are you starting or running in order to achieve leadership in your market? If you're an entrepreneur, what problem have you identified that will deliver such growth?
Certainly forging the unforged path is uncertain, but you can proceed with enough knowledge to determine if there's a market for the problem you're solving.
Over the years I've talked with people who develop a business or an idea because it's cool to them. But they don't know who their customer is or if they'd want to buy their product. Your success odds naturally increase the more you understand this. And conversely, your failure rate goes up when you ignore the basics.
Whatever problem you're solving think about the growth potential. Consider, also that it might not always be fully monetary. Some growth opportunities come by strategically taking on particular jobs or working with the best people you can because you'll exponentially expand your ability to build the next thing on your list when you're ready.
In all of what I've shared in this letter, the power is in the doing. Richard talks about how principles are more important than knowledge once you have the competence you need. More is a sign of avoiding doing the work. Next week I'll dive more into principles.