N=1 is Not a Reliable Study

Jonathan Goodman
Aug 9, 2017 · 3 min read

If it was easy to get gobs of clients overnight with no work, everybody would do it.

Yes, I know that the goo-roos will make you think that it’s easy. Sometimes when you look at Facebook it seems like all of the other people are having all of the success getting all dem’ clients, making buckets of cashola, and catching z’s under palm trees and look at me I tried and failed and woe is me and what am I doing wrong?

Some people blame others:

That thing I bought from that guy that thousands of people have had success with didn’t work for me. My situation is different because …

…and this is where I stop them.

Their situations are not different.

They are different and not in a good way. They made the mistake of thinking that n=1 is a reliable test.

Inigo Montoya had a mission in the Princess Bride. He was going to find the man who killed his father. He never gave up. Inigo Montoya found the six-fingered man and killed him.

No matter how many times an anvil got dropped on Wile E. Coyote’s head he never gave up. From 1949–1980 he tried to catch the elusive road runner then, in 1980, 31 years after he started, Wile Coyote caught the Roadrunner. It was a historic moment in television history.

One person and one attempt, or a small number of attempts, is not a reliable indicator.

At dinner with friends last week somebody asked what happened with Joey’s spinoff show after Friends. A buddy asked Siri, got the answer, and proudly announced to the table the answer.

Nobody cared about the answer.

We were making conversation, enjoying the company doing what friends do: talking about stuff that doesn’t matter, laughing, and eating good food.

In my book, Viralnomics (www.viralnomics.com/book), I talk about the Encyclopedia Britannica and how, on March 13, 2012, after 244 years in print, the company announced that it would no longer be printing books.

Countless nights mini-Jon lay on the floor with a random volume of those gold-trimmed pages reading whatever caught the little stud’s interest. Now they’re gone.

What a shame.

It’s amazing that we have the combined knowledge of the world in a device that fits in our pockets but with this great power comes responsibility. And the responsibility is to never forget that real growth, real wisdom doesn’t come from finding an answer, it comes from the search.

Reading books is a search. It’s a journey. It teaches you patience and understanding.

That patience and trust in the process is what’s missing and it’s why you might not be getting clients.

Information is no longer valuable. It used to be that a particular tactic to achieve a goal (say, a method to get online training clients) was worth something.

Becoming demoralized and giving up after a few attempts is an unfortunate reality of our modern day world. Immediacy, or the urge to have everything right now with no work is omnipresent and is the reason why so many fail to get online training clients.

Be different.

Pursue strategy and seek out process.

If somebody were to tell you the results of a study on say, whether or not white rice is bad, or red meat causes cancer, or eggs being bad, or good, or good but as long as you don’t eat the yolk, then you should ask how many people participated in the study and look for biases to verify the results.

One person or one try in a study is not a reliable study. This is what N=1 means. It is not reliable. You should discredit the study yet, with your business, N=1 seems to be enough to give up and claim that the problem is beyond your control. I see it every day moo-chacho. It’s why good online trainers fail.

They didn’t really want it, and that’s fine. I can’t help them.

But if you are willing to believe in the process and put in the work then get yourself on the waiting list for my Online Trainer Academy and enroll next time that it opens up. Link is here: (www.onlinetrainer.com/academy)

-Coach Jon

Jonathan Goodman

Written by

A nomadic family man running an international education company for fit pros. www.theptdc.com, @jon_ptdc

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