The Deceptive Power of Starting Small
As a culture, we underrate the value of starting small and overvalue grand ambitions. This is reflected in graduation speeches, book titles, and celebrating those with aspirations to make a dent in the universe. But in doing so we do ourselves a great disservice. Our most ambitious goals appear to be so daunting that we never take the first step.
Starting small creates inertia, builds momentum, and leads to visible progress. As computer scientist and entrepreneur Paul Graham says, “The way to do really big things seems to be to start with deceptively small things.”
Ryan Holiday writes in his book Ego is the Enemy:
A few years ago, one of the founders of Google gave a talk in which he said the way he judges prospective companies and ideas is by asking them if they’re going to change the world. This is fine, except that’s not how Google started — Larry Page and Sergei Brin were two Stanford PhD’s working on their dissertation). It’s not how YouTube started — its founders weren’t trying to reinvent TV; they were trying to share funny video clips. It’s not how most true wealth was created, in fact.
Grand ambitions cause people to be delusional optimists. They make decisions based entirely on possibility without considering the probability of their success.
