How a “startup mentality” can make your life more awesome?
Last time, we discussed OKRs and goal setting. Now, let’s take the next step — exploring what we can learn from startups about doing things DIFFERENTLY and in a meaningful way.
(And how 300,000 years of our ancestors outrunning sabre-tooth tigers play against us today)
EXPERIMENTATION, HYPOTHESIS TESTING & FOCUS
There’s a story about Elon Musk asking a top executive at the newly-acquired Twitter what EXACTLY they had accomplished in the last two weeks. While it’s a compelling question, an even better one might be, “What have you accomplished DIFFERENTLY in the last two weeks?”
“Doing things differently” is often the only way to significantly improve the outcomes in the shortest possible time, but…
- Throughout 300,000 years of evolution, we humans were never truly pushed to alter our behaviour rapidly. Our species thrived on gradual changes across generations, not abrupt ones within weeks. Evolution was in no hurry.
- Moreover, evolution highly values efficiency. Our brain, accounting for just 2% of our body mass, guzzles up 25% of our total energy consumption. This trade-off has wired us to minimize brain activity and conserve energy. Yes, we’re lazy by design!
This need for energy conservation, coupled with the repetitive nature of daily challenges (like evading saber-toothed tigers), gave birth to our ultimate efficiency tool: habits.
Habits. At age 5, brushing your teeth can be quite the task. By 20, you hardly recall how and when you brushed your teeth in the morning. By 30, habits drive up to 80% of your day (time-wise).
The same goes for our work lives — doing what we’re already good at becomes second nature. Eventually, we could execute daily tasks flawlessly while in a medically-induced coma.
While it is a very efficient approach from the evolutionary standpoint, there is a problem: The law of diminishing returns hits us hard. Each incremental improvement demands more and more effort. If you feel your progress is stalling, this could be the culprit — it’s not that you aren’t working hard enough.
Diminishing returns of collective effort: Consider this — the law of diminishing returns applies to crowds as well. Just glance at LinkedIn and Medium these days. It appears everyone’s buzzing about AI and ChatGPT, with articles blending into a monotonous sea of sameness. Which one should you read, and is it even worth delving into the same topic for the tenth time this week? The topic seems hot — should you write an article on it yourself ?
This is when trying to “ride the trend” morphs into “too late, too expensive” (the same principle applies to financial markets — when the hype peaks and your grandma chats about NFTs over dinner, it’s time to sell, my friend).
So how to deal with the diminishing returns? Startups tackle this issue through continuous innovation — repeatedly doing things DIFFERENTLY. Unlike a 9–5 office worker, a startup cannot afford to stagnate; it must constantly enhance performance and grow. Hence, it needs to continuously experiment. This process can be depicted as a sequence of S-curves, where as soon as initial efforts pay off, experimentation (doing things differently) begins, ensuring that when the first effort reaches its limit, something new is ready to propel you forward.
So, HOW do you do things DIFFERENTLY? In startups, the Hypothesis Testing approach is key. Each INPUT to the Key Results (refer to the article on OKRs) is essentially a Hypothesis to be tested.
Objective (Become the top software seller) → Key Result: INPUT (generate 200 leads) → OUTCOME (+55% in sales).
A startup doesn’t know if 200 leads will yield a +55% increase in sales, but it’s a solid hypothesis to start with.
The same approach works in our personal lives. Let’s frame it within the OKR framework:
OKR (Become a better communicator) → Key Result: INPUT (write 3 meaningful articles a week) → OUTCOME (average 10 reads per article).
Will publishing three meaningful articles a week result in an average of 10 reads? I’m not sure. Is it a reasonable hypothesis to test over a one-month period? Absolutely!
EASY WAY TO FRAME AND TEST A HYPOTHESIS BY ASKING 3 QUESTIONS:
- What do I believe to be true? “IF I do Y, THEN X will happen.”
- How will I know that X has happened? What numbers will indicate success?
- How long am I willing to wait for these numbers before concluding that the hypothesis has been rejected?
One more thing to remember while using the hypothesis testing approach is to stay FOCUSED — less is often better. When you’re testing too many hypotheses simultaneously, it’s easy to end up with a schedule that resembles a soccer mom’s day: “Wake up, cook breakfast, wake up kids, take kids to soccer practice, do laundry, pick up kids from soccer practice, cook lunch, take kids to the birthday party, fix car, pick up kids from the birthday party… GOODNESS, FINALLY SUNDAY IS OVER!”
In summary, EXPERIMENT, FOCUS, and TEST. Not only will you progress more quickly, but you’ll also have the flexibility to adjust your OKRs if you find that your priorities change along the way.
Now, what if the priorities DO change? Here comes the AGILE (to be continued)…
