The Most Important Number is One
I had the privilege today to listen to the fascinating story of Diane Greene’s thrilling career path that led her from Psychology to Mechanical Engineering to Naval Architecture to Computer Science. Prior to founding VMWare and becoming SVP of Google Cloud, she designed oil rigs, created the multimedia streaming platform that Microsoft acquired for Windows Media Player, and made a few stops along the way as a windsurfing beachcomber in Hawaii and treasure hunter excavating a Spanish Galleon off the coast of Saipan. She is a legitimate bad ass.
Rather than implement an orchestrated plan, Diane’s smarts and penchant for risk-taking drove her to seize opportunity. Her experience as a windsurfer taught her that it’s better to make a less-informed fast decision and rapidly readjust than to make a better-informed slow decision. From an early age she was already practicing a key Design Thinking concept: the most important number is one.
In today’s era of hyper-efficiency, productivity often gets defined mathematically as doing more with less. Higher numerator, lower denominator. Make your first experiment your last. Optimize. Yet the pursuit of accomplishing everything often results in accomplishing nothing. If you have too many priorities, then you have none. Or as Bonobos co-founder (and Stanford GSB grad) Andy Dunn eloquently wrote: get one thing right.
“The Journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” — Lao Tzu
Your first product. Your first feature. Your first customer. Your first sale. Your first job. Like anything with diminishing returns, the hardest and most important number to reach is one. Two, three, 5,000, 20,000,000 all matter, but you will never get there until you achieve number one. Besides, they will come more easily once you’ve reached your first, which is a key way to get unstuck. Do more not with less, but by doing less.
Our careers are no different. A few weeks ago I was with undergraduate friend who recently changed majors and was planning to stay half a year longer before graduating. She was convinced that an extra 6 months would enable her to figure out what she wanted to do and find the perfect job. I’ve heard business school students 5–15 years older say the same thing. Soul-searching to identify that perfect job is a good thing, in theory.
“In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.” — Yogi Berra
In practice, 29% of MBA graduates will leave their first job post-graduation in less than two years. This is a reflection that there is no perfect job, and that we are always figuring it out.
One school of thought says that you should find your next job to set you up for where you want to be in 5 years. Another school of thought says that you should just find that future job today. A third school of thought is to think about what you love, make a quick choice between good options on that list, and focus on it until you find that it’s time to change. Iterate rapidly. If you find the uncertainty of iteration scary, just think how much scarier the certainty of being stuck is. Be intentional of an expanding mindset and you will have a chance to change. A good lesson we should all learn from Diane Greene is to heed another piece of sage advice from Yogi Berra:
“When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” — Yogi Berra
This article was originally published on May 23, 2017.
