You know nothing Mr. Marks.
At the moment of writing, my son is about 180 days old. Here I leave a learning I want to document and will share with him once the time is right. If you’re not my son — I hope this will add value to your life.If you feel like it, leave a comment and make it better!
Hi buddy,
You’re probably a hotshot now. Living the life, learning a lot, making friends and relationships.( I hope you picked up cooking and can prepare a proper meal!)
At a point in life, and you put in the work you’ll become pretty good in something. You maybe even make some achievements. Mastered a skill, won a trophee, received a degree or worked out a tactic of any kind.
You might come up to this point where you think you have it all figured out..
Well, I’m here to tell you that you don’t. You haven’t got anything figured out and you never will.
Kinda depressing really, I know — Let me explain why.
There is probably some doctor who thought of this as well and created a fancy name for it, but I call it the destination effect and in plain English it says: You know nothing Mr. Marks [1].
The destination effect.
The destination effect sucks. There have been several occasions in my life where this effect have made me fail like a rock. But first, let me explain what it is.
There are a few problems which come with thinking you made your destination. When you think you think you master something. The biggest one is that it gives a feeling of A. comfort and B. control. Which A. You shouldn’t have and B. you don’t have..
Truth is, you don’t control anything in life. Even your own body and mind aren’t in your complete control.
You influence.
Obviously, you can alter your emotions, your thinking and make decisions. That’s actually where true power lies.. But you never control any situation.
Remember that.
Like you influence your mind and body, so are others.. People will constantly try to influence your decision making and your emotions. They will make you want to believe you made a choice, but in fact, your brain is this ancient machine which can (and will) be hacked by others.
In fact, some people’s sole job is to make you think or feel something and then take action. Think of neuro-marketeers or conversation rate people.. This is probably even worse in 2030..
This also is true for your body. Although you (hopefully) have a body which you can ‘control’ like a normal human being — there are virussuses, bacteria and dangerous situations out there which can really harm you. I’m not sure how this is in your world now, but in 2018 we have a lot of car accidents happen because people are using a phone during driving. Crazy stuff..
You can’t influence another’s behaviour, but someone else’s behaviour can influence you!
The other problem with the destination effect is that it sneaks in comfort. I think you should always look for ways to keep pushing yourself within the limits of your health and sanity. It’s what gets your growth.
The destination effect is an evil bastard which will feed you snacks of a fixed mindset [2]. It makes you think you’ve reached 100%. That there isn’t any room for improvement. The problem is that this thinking leads to creating the opposite of what initially got you at where you are today. There is no 100%…
What happens when you get at your destination? When are you finished? When did you win?
When you stop putting energy in the skill you mastered, you’ll quickly turn mediocre.
The flaw of life is that you play it for eternity. Life isn’t a game you can win, it’s a game you can only play [3].
The battle of the balls.
So, you just cried and I fed you an extra bottle. For some reason you’re not feeling like sleeping today. But this will mean you’ll probably get hangry again at around 01:30. Which means, I’m just going to wait and keep on writing.
In fact, the extra time made me creative and I made another amazing drawing for you, trying to explain this effect a bit better.
You probably know the saying of :’ keeping too many balls in the air.’
The idea is that when you juggle your efforts you run the risk of letting a bal falling to the ground. The more balls you keep up in the air, the more difficult it gets. This idea also applies for the destination effect.
Let’s explore!
We identify two type of balls. One can be easily influenced by external events. Think of changing technology, relationships, history, facts, in some cases even science. The other ones are influenced by your actions. Do you decide to work-out? To practice? To work on a specific project which challenges you?
You get the point?
We know that gravity pulls the balls back to the ground and that life is always looking for homeostasis. Life is always looking for some kind of balance. So once you stop putting in the effort because you think you’ve mastered the skill — you actually already getting worse. Even more bad news is that the other problem is that not only the ball comes down if you keep putting the same effort in.. the ground level actually rises as well! The floor is boiling lava![5]
Some of the balls fall a bit slower since it’s more ingrained in your muscle memory or system. But others drop like a rock. A good example of a quick mover is when people diet. It goes up extremely when you put in your efforts, but it changes dramatically fast once you lose the discipline to keep up.
An example of a slow mover is swimming. Once you learn to swim, you keep the technique. But you will certainly have to get into it again once you haven’t swum for a few years.
If you stop learning, you stop growing, and the balls will slowly fall down and die. And even if you kicked up your ball high once, the ground will catch up one day.
So how did the destination effect affect me?
It started in 2014. I just left my startup and start working at a publisher. They were following the business model canvas and lean startup principles. Basically they used a scientific model for business development. They used canvasses and models and really structured way to talk to customers, build solutions for problems they actually had and grow from there. I quickly learned all I could find on these models. I researched everything I could find online. I joined seminars. Talked to experts, until the point I didn’t hear anything new. I started using the models for startups there and saw others using them up close. For about 1.5 years, I truly believed these models where the recipe for succes. It didn’t really matter which problem you were solving, use these methods, pivot a few times and you will get a million dollar solution. We were looking for shortcuts, growth-hacks and silver bullets to reach short-term success.
Once the money ran out. They shut the whole lab down. Was it the people? Was it the systems? Was it the ideas? Leadership? Or the execution?
It probably was a combination which made this fail. But the real shock for me was that, the systems I thought we all mastered and would bring success, didn’t. That doesn’t mean the systems sucked. But it does mean that I had to keep on learning. I needed to push myself further, start questioning everything others have written and test those for myself.
These principles had been adopted by millions of people. And Eric Ries [4] had really thought of creating something which seemed to work for some people and scales. It made sense! But.. in the end we are all just people and we constantly improve on each other work all the time. I had to allow myself to question the status quo, take what works and re-iterate on the broken parts.
I’m going to leave you with two last quotes of Nikola Tesla and Albert Einstein.
It is paradoxical, yet true, to say, that the more we know, the more ignorant we become in the absolute sense, for it is only through enlightenment that we become conscious of our limitations. Precisely one of the most gratifying results of intellectual evolution is the continuous opening up of new and greater prospects. Nikola Tesla
The More I Learn, The More I Realize How Much I Don’t Know.” —
Albert Einstein.
A last thought on this
You have been raised in a West European world. You have been privileged by getting education and to live in a rich country called The Netherlands. As we speak, there are 17.076.562 people living in this small country’.
Then you have a city you probably never heard of. It’s called Chongqing. As we speak it has 30.170.000 people living there. That is almost double our little dutch culture — in just one city..
You have no idea what triggers these people, you have no idea how their lives look, you have no idea what moves them, how they feel and what their customs are. These people are so different from you, al while you think you have it figured out. And they think exactly the same.
You might think you do Mr. Marks.
But you know nothing.
Love,
Dad.
ANNEX
[1] Well, to be fair. You might know something. I just wanted to quote this series I’ve been following for some years. You can probably rent it for a few euro’s credits now. It’s called Game of Thrones, I think it’s worth it.
[2] You can learn more about a fixed and growth mindset here.
[3] It’s very true, and also one of the lyrics in a song of Toto — Dying on my feet | Falling in between 2006.
[4] Eric Ries sort of is the father of Lean Startup. He wrote the book about it.
