But you can. Especially if your community is there to help. All help is self-help, multiplied by the expectations, support and compassion of the people around you.
Willpower and self-control are a mystery–we’re influenced far more by our situation, by the culture around us and by everything that’s come before. A mechanistic view of a physical entity shows that we’re turtles all the way down–atoms and electricity, each on a path. Golf balls don’t have self control, they simply follow a trajectory. And yet… each of us apparently has the ability to exercise agency and to work to solve the problems we confront. We talk to others and to ourselves, and shifting those conversations can shift the actions we take.
The best books in the genre help us get to where we hope to go. They turn on a light or help us understand a way of thinking that gets us unstuck.
Tomorrow, The Knot goes to people around the world. It’s aimed directly at the stuck we often find ourselves in. I’m confident that the book itself won’t do much of anything, but combined with conversations and the shifts we can each make, I’m hopeful it will help people get to where they need to go.
That’s a lot to ask from a short book, but it’s already had an impact on thousands of people. Thank you for showing up to make things better. Knowing that better is possible is a great first step.
The sensitivity analysis for a decision is easy to overlook, because we tend to focus on the expected outcome.
Perhaps it makes sense to begin with the edges instead.
Upside: If this works, really works, what are the implications?
Downside: If this fails, totally, what are the costs?
After we understand the edges, then it makes sense to be more nuanced about the chances of either happening and start discussing the likely outcome.
Want to try a brand new place for dinner? The worst that can happen is that you’ll waste a dinner. On the other hand, if it’s dinner with your new big account and the boss is coming, the worst that can happen is very different.
Should you buy a lottery ticket? Well, the big outcome is millions of dollars. The small outcome is a total waste. Now that we understand the extremes, perhaps it pays to realize that the odds of winning are essentially zero, so we ought to pass.
Don’t be dissuaded by the small or transfixed by the big. That’s only the first half of the calculation.
Of course, this is obvious. And yet we are rarely patient enough to do all the steps. (Driving to the airport is dramatically more dangerous than getting on a plane…)
If you sit down to watch a documentary and realize, about ten minutes in, that it’s actually a feature film, everything about it feels off until you shift into a different mode.
Walk into a new doctor’s office, and it might take a few minutes to realize they’re not the kind of doctor you’re used to. Perhaps they focus on selling procedures or pills or treatments–the sort of remedies you might have been comfortable buying in a different setting, but right here, right now, it doesn’t feel right.
A hotel without a lobby might have rooms that are sufficiently quiet, clean and convenient, but because they skipped a signalling device, it takes a second to switch gears… In fact, we might never get settled in this new place.
When we create a product or service, we have the chance to invest in our genre signals. The interactions, sounds and tropes that let our customers know what to expect. Many of them are dated or seem to have low utility, but we ignore their value at our own risk. Confusing your customers can be expensive.
Genre can be a generous signalling device. When you invest in telling us what to expect, you get a chance to keep a promise.
Sometimes we make poor choices.
And, unrelated to that, sometimes bad luck happens.
The real problem kicks in after that.
One bad decision after another. Choices that compound the problem instead of solving it. Digging a deeper hole, amplifying the damage and spreading the effects through space and time.
We often try to justify previous errors by making them again.
We defend sunk costs.
We choose the path of the victim.
We misunderstand the bad luck that came before or decide to teach the universe a lesson.
It might be that we overreact and run away from good options merely because we stumbled last time. Or we could fail to see the pattern and choose to repeat it.
Every decision is a new event. We have new information, new options and most of all, we’re smarter than we were last time.
If we want to be.
If you can provide the cheapest, fastest and best option, there will be a line out the door for your service or product.
Most providers know, though, that good, fast and inexpensive are trade-offs. You will have trouble offering all three.
And in a competitive marketplace, as soon as someone starts racing to the bottom and cutting corners, keeping up is brutal.
The alternative is to walk away from the race.
Instead, offer just one: You’ll pay a lot but you’ll get more than you pay for.
In every market I can think of, there’s always demand for an option that is noticeably faster.
And even more so, there’s a market for something that’s obviously better.
The hard part isn’t finding the market. The hard part is keeping the promise.
If you were required to charge five times what you charge now, how would you change what you offer?
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