Orders of Magnitude
Never go for the 1% or 2% or even 10% improvements. Although these improvements require time and effort to achieve and maintain, these small gains are tiny, often imperceptible, to a person.
No, I say waste no effort even considering any kind of cost-benefit exchange. Ignore these small fruit within your grasp. You will be picking berries all your life because it is easy, because you can see the nearby goal. Instead, spend a little more effort looking for and finding the watermelons. The larger goal might take more creativity to achieve and the end may not easily be in sight, but in the end you spend orders of magnitude less time and effort. Much more importantly, you employ your natural human faculties to create. You enjoy imagining and innovating much more than the tedious and repetitive.
Unfortunately, the world focuses on picking berries. Although we naturally love to reason and think and be creative, for some reason, we also love to accumulate the small improvements. I think the quick satisfaction and low chance of failure cause us to avoid a much more fruitful but less clear end. Established companies depend on squeezing out small improvements in efficiency, at the cost of quality and employee morale. These big companies grew large due to a several order of magnitude innovation, but, now large, the executives do not want to risk innovation. They prefer to squeeze out whatever profit they can from their established product until the company smothers itself under its own morass of details.
Even in your day to day tasks, you focus on small details which seem significant. They, however, pale in comparison to real efforts you can contribute to create orders of magnitudes of improvement. Environmentalism is a great example. Some people go through great pains to recycle what is left after consuming something. But what if they don’t consume it in the first place? Would their life be materially more unhappy? Not at all by any scientific survey. Not at all by any experiment I have done. In fact, if you really sit down to think about it, the next thing you buy you almost definitely do not need and you probably don’t actually want. It just takes effort to go out and buy, to store, to maintain, to consume, and to dispose of. Sometimes it makes you feel guilty (e.g. many snack foods). What actually affects you most is who you are with and how you think about life, others, and yourself. Changing your thinking brings orders of magnitude of change. Buying more baubles does nothing.
People often hate their jobs because they pick berries. At a career fair the other day, I overheard many students asking the recruiters what kind of work they would be doing, will I be “creating new models” or something else? No matter what job you have, in whatever industry, in a large company you will be making small improvements to the existing process. Thats why they hire you and others. The guys at the top found the berries, and they are hiring you to pick them. It doesn’t matter if you are in the research department or if you are the manager of trading. If you are lucky, your job is minimally creative.
But that does not have to be the case. I think it’s possible to move away from this model. The company just needs to make a solid commitment to not make small improvements. All changes, all work, should not only be quantifiable, but easily qualitatively perceptible in value to the outside world. Demand that no efficiency improve things by less than an order of magnitude. Let’s define an order of magnitude as doubling, twice the original. So, ten times better would be a little more than 3 orders magnitude (2^3). A thousand-fold improvement is 10 OM’s. There are few 10 OM in reach but many 3 OM changes.
So, don’t figure out how to improve department communication by 10%. Figure out how to eliminate the 90% of the communications, documentation, and emails which are not only useless but also suffocating. A strong 10 OM improvement.
Usually, these major improvements are so large and fundamentally revolutionary, the improvements are barely measurable:
Don’t increase staff by 50% so you can have more people indexing the Internet by hand. Instead, build an automated search engine that intelligently uses links already online to figure out which web pages are the best. Immeasurable improvement that actually scales.
Don’t stick a slightly faster computer chip and more RAM into your video game system. Instead, design a completely different game controller which couples motion and your whole body tightly with the game. Qualitatively improve the way people experience and invest themselves in your games.
The orders of magnitude improvements are always there. You can always find them, as long as you do not occupy any of your time with the small ones.
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