Introduction
All adaptive organisms face a fundamental tradeoff between pursuing a known reward––exploitation––and sampling lesser-known options in search of something better––exploration.Imagine this from the eyes of a hunter-gatherer. Exploration = finding trees that have berries you can munch on. Exploitation = munching on berries. The challenge is that evolution drives us to scan our environment for more blueberry trees – even with the mouthful of berries we still have from the first tree.Before the discovery of fire, this pattern was great for survival. It’s not so great for avoiding shiny object syndrome while scaling a startup.You want to be both an explorer and exploiter. However, for two reasons––neurological and psychological––you are likely susceptible to over-exploring.Excess exploration can sabotage your long-term focus and decrease your followthrough, causing you to fall off exponential growth curves before the compounding sets in.Neurobiologically, our nucleus accumbens craves the excretion of pleasure-filled dopamine which comes from novelty-seeking (exploration).But sometimes dopamine is not to be trusted. Because psychologically, we tend to be blind to complexity. As Chris Parnin, professor of Computer Science at North Carolina University puts it – at first, your strategy seems simple. But something sinister awaits. An invisible forest of unending complexity exists within a new pursuit, and it can distract even the ablest from attaining their goals.And if you’re entrepreneurial, you’re even more at risk for this. Based on the Big Five personality traits, entrepreneurs tend to score high in "Openness to Experience," which makes them even more inclined to explore.In a business context, every product, customer avatar, or new employee can cascade into endless variations of possible directions and a swamp of subtasks to worry about. The cognitive load increases. Sunk cost fallacy kicks in. We start to make irrational decisions that lead to suboptimal outcomes. The further we go down a new path, the less likely we are to untangle from the forest of complexity.We start fighting multiple battles on multiple fronts. But if you’re moving in several directions at once, flow will elude you. Fragmented focus hampers progress, amplifies complexity, and decreases motivation.
Learning Objectives
- Simplify Your Strategy (Be an Exploitative Explorer)
- Simplify Your Focus (Will it Make the Boat Go Faster?)
- Simplify Your Flow Source (Get Your Flow Elsewhere)
Solution 1: Simplify Your Strategy
"What’s essential is to do less better." ~ Marcus Aurelius
Strategy, simply put, is what you’re going to do and how you’re going to do it. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, the company was on the brink of failure. During the final quarter of 1996, their sales plummeted by 30%. They had lost $1.4 billion and were 90 days from being insolvent.Fresh off a partnership deal with the industry-dominating Microsoft, Steve Jobs reviewed the company’s sprawling product line. Apple had been producing multiple versions of the same product to satisfy requests from different retailers. They had a dozen versions of the Macintosh computer. Jobs asked his team, "Which one do I tell my friends to buy?" He got jumbled, competing answers, riddled with uncertainty. So Jobs sliced the product line by 70%: One desktop and one laptop for business, and one of each for consumers.One year later, the company turned a $309-million-dollar profit. Billions of dollars of enterprise value ensued, and Apple became the most valuable company in the world.Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.Apple was stuck in a chronic phase of exploration, adding new products, modifying things, and dispersing its strategy. It was chasing opportunity instead ofcompounding focus into its proven products. Jobs knew it wasn’t the time to explore the unknown. It was time to exploit the opportunity that prior exploration provided.Being flow-prone requires knowing how to navigate the tradeoff between exploitation and exploration.But how?Well, no matter your strategy and where you are applying it––your job, business, or skill development–– you can simplify using Occam’s Razor (also called the law of parsimony).Occam's Razor states that "among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected."A memorable mantra here: Simple scales, fancy fails.And the good news is –– it works both ways.New explorations are fractal––recursive patterns within patterns. But so is our effectiveness (and exploitations). Chaos theory asserts––with a great deal of empirical backing––that the universe is wildly unbalanced. Cause and effect are rarely linked in an equal way.The Pareto principle states that "for many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes." This principle shows up everywhere––in the flow of rivers, rabbit populations, and craters on the moon. The richest 20% make 80% of the income. For Microsoft, fixing the top 20% of the most-reported bugs eliminated 80% of the related crashes. In baseball, 15% of all the players produce 85% of the total wins.In business, a few team members produce most of the output. A handful of customers bring in most of the revenue. A few products cause most of the sales. A small fraction of your marketing is responsible for the majority of your results.This means you can simplify your strategy by doing less better. Find the fractal patterns and places where a very small cause is producing a large effect. Small input, massive output. Then strip away almost everything else.Go for the 20 percent within the 80/20, and the 20 percent of the 20 percent. If you do this distillation across every area, it's like concentrating the power of the sun with a magnifying glass. Simple. Powerful.
Solution 2: Simplify Your Focus
As we’ve seen, there’s a time and place for exploration. So how do you know when an explorative opportunity is worth pursuing?Ben Hunt-Davis was part of an underachieving rowing team. In 1998, they set themselves the crazy goal of winning an Olympic gold medal. In just two years. For context: Competitive opportunities for rowers are rare; they might only race a mere 6 times a year. Ben had his work cut out for him with grueling training and constant iteration of his team’s strategy. They challenged everything they did with the question, "Will it make the boat go faster?" If it didn’t make the boat go faster, they’d try something different. Gradually, their results improved. Before they knew it, their crazy goal started to seem almost sane.On September 25th, 2000, Ben and his crew won gold at the Sydney Olympics. They were the first British crew to have won this event since 1912.As Ben demonstrates, with the right approach, we can accomplish incredible things. But in order to use this question as a filter, you need to know what your boat is. Think of your boat as the essence of what you’re aiming to achieve.Once you’ve defined this, you want to filter every decision by asking, "Will it make the boat go faster?"Use this as a decision proxy whenever you’re deciding whether to disperse your attention from exploiting to exploring. If it doesn’t make the boat go faster, then don’t do it.Every new hire, every potential partnership, every company culture shift… will it make the boat go faster?Every career change, every opportunity, every new routine… will it make the boat go faster?Every shift in your schedule, every new relationship, every new project… will it make the boat go faster?Along the way, you’ve probably accumulated a lot of heavy cargo that’s slowing it down. As that happens, dig out Occam’s Razor and slice the excess cargo off.
Solution 3: Simplify Your Flow Source
You'll get plenty of flow throughout your career. But it pays to have a high-flow hobby on the side.With work, you’ll have bursts of flow when challenge and skill are aligned. But over time, you’ll become so skilled at it that you’ll get bored. Your wiring will then tempt you to enter the exploration phase again. In exploration, you get a hit of dopamine, and it's easier to get back into flow. But you’ll start over at square one.Rule of thumb: When you reach a flow plateau, don’t seek flow through premature exploration (and the novelty that comes with it). Sit tight. Tame your need for stimulation and excitement, and flow will reemerge as part of the ongoing exploitation phase.As Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi put it in his book Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning, "We usually pay attention to the things we like, that interest us, that engage our skills. But the relationship works the other way, as well: We get to like whatever we pay careful attention to. Because of this, a good strategy is to invest energy in things that have the potential to sustain growth, even if at first we are not particularly interested in them. Eventually, we learn more about them, and interest will be awakened."As an entrepreneur or leader, for certain periods, good business––effective strategy––can be pretty boring. But it's wise not to use your profession as a primary source of flow. Because it can distort your decision-making to optimize for personal flow rather than organizational success.When this happens, professionals start to use their teams, colleagues, or organizations as a source of entertainment. They fiddle with it like it’s a joystick for a hit of dopamine. The high-flow performer opts for simplicity: Continue to exploit a validated strategy. Accept the decreased flow and follow through. If you persist, a new challenge will pop up at the next level, and you’ll get back into flow.In the meantime, get a hobby that gives you the flow you crave––take up skiing, mountaineering, or dancing. This will sustain you during low-flow periods of exploitation and execution.
To recap: 1. Explore until you secure something worth exploiting. Exploit until you’re forced to explore. 2. Filter every decision with the question, "Will it make the boat go faster?" 3. Find additional sources for flow to make the most of validated opportunities.Now that your focus is narrowed and simplified, in the final email of this series, we’ll ensure everything supports you in keeping the main thing the main thing.
