Incremental Success Quotes

Incremental change is better than ambitious failure. . . .Success feeds on itself.

If you're trying to do something where you will inevitably fail and be rejected repeatedly before you achieve your goal, then you will need a nonstandard relationship with winning, focusing on incremental goals.

But there is now a degree to which you have to ask whether his success is an indictment on the rest of us who have been working on much more incremental things. To the extent that the world still doubts Elon, I think it's a reflection on the insanity of the world and not on the supposed insanity of Elon. - Peter Thiel on Elon Musk

I was seeking comic originality, and fame fell on me as a by-product. The course was more plodding than heroic: I did not strive valiantly against doubters but took incremental steps studded with a few intuitive leaps.

Remembering your mistakes more acutely than any minor success. This was the worst. The things that kept you up at night. Tip a waiter that was too small. The words that didn't fit the moment. Words that didn't come till to late. You could kill yourself in increments, punishing your spirit day after day-regret. Guilt. Not the guilt of the little girl who woke in the night embarrassed God was mad at her because she had ticked balls under her shirt, pretending to have breasts. "I even felt sexy." That was sweet, and pure, no crime at all. But the crime of obsessive replay-get rid of it, get rid of it. Who could ever have known that hardest punishments would be the ones you gave yourself?

confidence to define success and failure for herself who succeeds. These words were not invented for an incremental life. “Success” and “failure” serve a world that is black-and-white. And as I said before, it’s all just kinda gray.

Leadership reveals itself in the big moments, but is forged in the small. It is the exponential and compounding product of our many incremental behaviors and actions; all of which arise out of our choices in values, beliefs & emotions. Choices all. Not a one is thrust upon us.

Think of microshifts as tiny increments of change in your day-to-day life. A microshift is changing what you eat for one part of one meal just one time. Then it’s doing that a second time and a third. Before you even realize what’s happening, you’ve adopted a pattern of behavior. What you do every single day accounts for the quality of your life and the degree of your success. It’s not whether you “feel” like putting in the work, but whether or not you do it regardless.

The case for the humanities is not hard to make, though it can be difficult--to such an extent have we been marginalized, so long have we acceded to that marginalization--not to sound either defensive or naive. The humanities, done right, are the crucible in which our evolving notions of what it means to be fully human are put to the test; they teach us, incrementally, endlessly, not what to do, but how to be. Their method is confrontational, their domain unlimited, their "product" not truth but the reasoned search for truth, their "success" something very much like Frost's momentary stay against confusion.

Despite the fact that Murray was one of the preeminent civil rights leaders of the twentieth century, most people have never heard of her. She achieved her leadership role and her success in subverting white supremacy by learning from her failures and capitalizing on the most incremental successes.

The spiraling flights of moths appear haphazard only because of the mechanisms of olfactory tracking are so different from our own. Using binocular vision, we judge the location of an object by comparing the images from two eyes and tracking directly toward the stimulus. But for species relying on the sense of smell, the organism compares points in space, moves in the direction of the greater concentration, then compares two more points successively, moving in zigzags toward the source. Using olfactory navigation the moth detects currents of scent in the air and, by small increments, discovers how to move upstream.

Stop Being Incremental! If your system no longer delivers the results you want, don’t go for incremental changes, instead go for complete transformation.

there’s also a lot to be said for making small, incremental changes that reap big dividends in the long term.

You take whatever victories you find in this game, and you measure success in the smallest of increments.

Incremental progress leads to long-lasting results.

Decades of countercultural rebellion have failed to change anything because the theory of society on which the countercultural idea rests is false. We do not live in the Matrix, nor do we live in the spectacle. The world we live in is in fact much more prosaic. It consists of billions of human beings, each pursuing more or less plausible conceptions of the good, trying to cooperate with one another, and doing so with varying degrees of success. There is no single, overarching system that integrates it all. The culture cannot be jammed because there is no such thing as "the culture" or "the system". There is only a hodge-podge of social institutions, most tentatively thrown together, which distribute the benefits and burdens of social cooperation in ways that sometimes we recognize to be just, but that are usually manifestly inequitable. In a world of this type, countercultural rebellion is not just unhelpful, it is positively counterproductive. Not only does it distract energy and effort away from the sort of initiatives that lead to concrete improvements in people's lives, but it encourages wholesale contempt for such incremental changes.

this book. One of the core beliefs I hold is the importance of compounding. Compounding takes place when you attempt One More Try, time and time again. When you're successful in implementing a One More Try mentality, you'll create and compound more wins for yourself. Each of those wins creates an incremental advancement toward your goals. You stack them on top of each other to produce significant long‐term changes in your life.

No longer satisfied with what we already have, we treat our withdrawal pains by incrementally upping the dosage. More shoes, more booze, more sex, more food, more "likes," just more. This phenomenon is known as hedonic adaptation>

Redefining winning in terms of incremental goals is not the same as giving yourself rewards for making progress—such rewards are counterintuitively ineffective and may even be detrimental.12 When you redefine winning, you set goals that are achievements in themselves—and success is its own reward.

Progress is like wheels that never stop; they have to keep turning in order to remain relevant to a car and all of its mechanical parts. Stopping is not an option in real time but it is to those that envy progress and upward mobility. Progress never ends because it is infinite but it rebuilds and readjust (s) to take increment steps then massive steps if it is hindered. - Terrance Robinson

By considering his forebears and contemporaries, Wedgwood was posting the guardrails on his path. In this way, a skilled engineer can be called a kind of “conservative,” not in a political sense but in the broader definition of looking to preserve the functional solutions of the present and past while making cautiously incremental adjustments—just enough to solve their particular problem at hand—that make sure attempted solutions don’t veer into uncharted territory where oversights can have real consequences in the real world. They know that the best results come from making small changes to the state of the art, while a radical engineer risks building a bridge that will collapse. An intuition constructed from records, experience, and institutional knowledge, like rules of thumb, never guarantees success, but it does point the engineer toward the trials and errors that are most likely to produce useful results and deepen the collective well of knowledge.

Strategy Lessons • Not every innovation idea has to be a blockbuster. Sufficient numbers of small or incremental innovations can lead to big profits. • Don’t just focus on new product development: Transformative ideas can come from any function—for instance, marketing, production, finance, or distribution. • Successful innovators use an “innovation pyramid,” with several big bets at the top that get most of the investment; a portfolio of promising midrange ideas in test stage; and a broad base of early stage ideas or incremental innovations. Ideas and influence can flow up or down the pyramid.

Henry had never felt so happy. Freshperson year had been one thing, an adventure, an exhilaration, all in all a success, but it had also been exhausting, a constant struggle and adjustment and tumult. Now he was locked in. Every day that summer had the same framework, the alarm at the same time, meals and workouts and shifts and SuperBoost at the same times, over and over, and it was that sameness, that repetition, that gave life meaning. He savored the tiny variations, the incremental improvements--tuna fish on his salad instead of turkey; tow extra reps on the bench press. Every move he made had purpose.

Your challenge as #GIRLBOSS is to dive headfirst into things without being too attached to the results. When your goal is to gain experience, perspective, and knowledge, failure is no longer a possibility. Failure is your invention.I believe that there is a silver lining in everything, and once you being to see it, you'll need sunglasses to combat the glare. It is she who listens to the rest of the world who fails, and it is she who has enough confidence to define success and failure for herself who succeeds. These words were not invented for an incremental life. "Success" and "failure" serve a world that is black-and-white. And as I said before, it's all just kinda grey.

What the most advanced researchers and theoreticians in all of science now comprehend is that the Newtonian concept of a universe driven by mass force is out of touch with reality, for it fails to account for both observable phenomena and theoretical conundrums that can be explained only by quantum physics: A quantum view explains the success of small efforts quite differently. Acting locally allows us to be inside the movement and flow of the system, participating in all those complex events occurring simultaneously. We are more likely to be sensitive to the dynamics of this system, and thus more effective. However, changes in small places also affect the global system, not through incrementalism, but because every small system participates in an unbroken wholeness. Activities in one part of the whole create effects that appear in distant places. Because of these unseen connections, there is potential value in working anywhere in the system. We never know how our small activities will affect others through the invisible fabric of our connectedness. In what Wheatley calls “this exquisitely connected world,” the real engine of change is never “critical mass”; dramatic and systemic change always begins with “critical connections.”14 So by now the crux of our preliminary needs should be apparent. We must open our hearts to new beacons of Hope. We must expand our minds to new modes of thought. We must equip our hands with new methods of organizing. And we must build on all of the humanity-stretching movements of the past half century: the Montgomery Bus Boycott; the civil rights movement; the Free Speech movement; the anti–Vietnam War movement; the Asian American, Native American, and Chicano movements; the women’s movement; the gay and lesbian movement; the disability rights/pride movement; and the ecological and environmental justice movements. We must find ourselves amid the fifty million people who as activists or as supporters have engaged in the many-sided struggles to create the new democratic and life-affirming values that are needed to civilize U.S. society.

When researchers with the National Weight Control Registry examined the tactics used by successful dieters, they found that two characteristics, in particular, stood out. People who successfully maintain weight loss typically eat breakfast every morning. They also weigh themselves each day. Part of the reason why these habits matter is practical: Eating a healthy breakfast makes it less likely you will snack later in the day, according to studies. And frequently measuring your weight allows us—sometimes almost subconsciously—to see how changing our diets influences the pounds lost. But just as important is the mental boost that daily, incremental weight loss provides. The small win of dropping even half a pound can provide the dose of momentum we need to stick with a diet. We need to see small victories to believe a long battle will be won.

Yet of the countless articles, books and so-called lifehacks about productivity I’ve read (or written!), the only “trick” that has ever truly and consistently worked is both the simplest and the most difficult to master: just getting started. Enter micro-progress. Pardon the gimmicky phrase, but the idea goes like this: For any task you have to complete, break it down into the smallest possible units of progress and attack them one at a time. ... My favorite expansion of this concept is in this post by James Clear. In it, he uses Newton’s laws of motion as analogies for productivity. To wit, rule No. 1: “Objects in motion tend to stay in motion. Find a way to get started in less than two minutes.” ... And it’s not just gimmicky phrases and so-called lifehacking: Studies have shown that you can trick your brain into increasing dopamine levels by setting and achieving, you guessed it, micro-goals. Going even further, success begets success. In a 2011 Harvard Business Review article, researchers reported finding that “ordinary, incremental progress can increase people’s engagement in the work and their happiness during the workday.

Imagine the following. Three groups of ten individuals are in a park at lunchtime with a rainstorm threatening. In the first group, someone says: “Get up and follow me.” When he starts walking and only a few others join in, he yells to those still seated: “Up, I said, and now!” In the second group, someone says: “We’re going to have to move. Here’s the plan. Each of us stands up and marches in the direction of the apple tree. Please stay at least two feet away from other group members and do not run. Do not leave any personal belongings on the ground here and be sure to stop at the base of the tree. When we are all there . . .” In the third group, someone tells the others: “It’s going to rain in a few minutes. Why don’t we go over there and sit under that huge apple tree. We’ll stay dry, and we can have fresh apples for lunch.” I am sometimes amazed at how many people try to transform organizations using methods that look like the first two scenarios: authoritarian decree and micromanagement. Both approaches have been applied widely in enterprises over the last century, but mostly for maintaining existing systems, not transforming those systems into something better. When the goal is behavior change, unless the boss is extremely powerful, authoritarian decree often works poorly even in simple situations, like the apple tree case. Increasingly, in complex organizations, this approach doesn’t work at all. Without the power of kings and queens behind it, authoritarianism is unlikely to break through all the forces of resistance. People will ignore you or pretend to cooperate while doing everything possible to undermine your efforts. Micromanagement tries to get around this problem by specifying what employees should do in detail and then monitoring compliance. This tactic can break through some of the barriers to change, but in an increasingly unacceptable amount of time. Because the creation and communication of detailed plans is deadly slow, the change produced this way tends to be highly incremental. Only the approach used in the third scenario above has the potential to break through all the forces that support the status quo and to encourage the kind of dramatic shifts found in successful transformations. (See figure 5–1.) This approach is based on vision—a central component of all great leadership.

1. Connect with Your Why Start by identifying your key motivations. Why do you want to reach your goal in the first place? Why is it important personally? Get a notebook or pad of paper and list all the key motivations. But don’t just list them, prioritize them. You want the best reasons at the top of your list. Finally, connect with these motivations both intellectually and emotionally. 2. Master Your Motivation There are four key ways to stay motivated as you reach for your goals: Identify your reward and begin to anticipate it. Eventually, the task itself can become its own reward this way. Recognize that installing a new habit will probably take longer than a few weeks. It might even take five or six months. Set your expectations accordingly. Gamify the process with a habit app or calendar chain. As Dan Sullivan taught me, measure the gains, not the gap. Recognize the value of incremental wins. 3. Build Your Team It’s almost always easier to reach a goal if you have friends on the journey. Intentional relationships provide four ingredients essential for success: learning, encouragement, accountability, and competition. There are at least seven kinds of intentional relationships that can help you grow and reach your goals: ​‣ ​Online communities ​‣ ​Running and exercise groups ​‣ ​Masterminds ​‣ ​Coaching and mentoring circles ​‣ ​Reading and study groups ​‣ ​Accountability groups ​‣ ​Close friendships If you can’t find a group you need, don’t wait. Start your own.

The wonder of evolution is that it works at all. I mean that literally: If you want to marvel at evolution, that’s what’s marvel-worthy. How does optimization first arise in the universe? If an intelligent agent designed Nature, who designed the intelligent agent? Where is the first design that has no designer? The puzzle is not how the first stage of the bootstrap can be super-clever and super-efficient; the puzzle is how it can happen at all. Evolution resolves the infinite regression, not by being super-clever and super-efficient, but by being stupid and inefficient and working anyway. This is the marvel. For professional reasons, I often have to discuss the slowness, randomness, and blindness of evolution. Afterward someone says: “You just said that evolution can’t plan simultaneous changes, and that evolution is very inefficient because mutations are random. Isn’t that what the creationists say? That you couldn’t assemble a watch by randomly shaking the parts in a box?” But the reply to creationists is not that you can assemble a watch by shaking the parts in a box. The reply is that this is not how evolution works. If you think that evolution does work by whirlwinds assembling 747s, then the creationists have successfully misrepresented biology to you; they’ve sold the strawman. The real answer is that complex machinery evolves either incrementally, or by adapting previous complex machinery used for a new purpose. Squirrels jump from treetop to treetop using just their muscles, but the length they can jump depends to some extent on the aerodynamics of their bodies. So now there are flying squirrels, so aerodynamic they can glide short distances. If birds were wiped out, the descendants of flying squirrels might reoccupy that ecological niche in ten million years, gliding membranes transformed into wings. And the creationists would say, “What good is half a wing? You’d just fall down and splat. How could squirrelbirds possibly have evolved incrementally?

A company at the top of its game has accumulated a number of rules of thumb—implicit assumptions and beliefs about what has been central to its success. New technologies and business models belie or change some of those assumptions, but they only seem sensible if the management team can become aware of those implicit assumptions and mind-sets and suspend them for a moment to contemplate the change. It’s very hard to do that with the inherited wisdom, experience, and lore of a company. This is why the failures of incumbents to capture the benefits of disruptive innovations are a result not of bad managers, but of good managers practicing what they have done best. Incremental innovations can quickly be scaled and incorporated. Disruptive innovations require changes in customer sets, business models, or performance metrics that are no longer consistent with what led to success in the past.

The entrepreneurs who stuck with Silicon Valley learned four big lessons from the dot-com crash that still guide business thinking today: 1. Make incremental advances Grand visions inflated the bubble, so they should not be indulged. Anyone who claims to be able to do something great is suspect, and anyone who wants to change the world should be more humble. Small, incremental steps are the only safe path forward. 2. Stay lean and flexible All companies must be “lean,” which is code for “unplanned.” You should not know what your business will do; planning is arrogant and inflexible. Instead you should try things out, “iterate,” and treat entrepreneurship as agnostic experimentation. 3. Improve on the competition Don’t try to create a new market prematurely. The only way to know you have a real business is to start with an already existing customer, so you should build your company by improving on recognizable products already offered by successful competitors. 4. Focus on product, not sales If your product requires advertising or salespeople to sell it, it’s not good enough: technology is primarily about product development, not distribution. Bubble-era advertising was obviously wasteful, so the only sustainable growth is viral growth.

In our imaginations, big, bold moves produce big successes. In the real world, big, bold moves mostly scare people away: you are trying to go too far, too fast. Small, incremental steps accomplish more. This is especially true if two parties are far apart in a negotiation.

For Hershey, the time of prognosis is a single moment of telling but also an extended, if not indefinite, period of negotiation and identification. During that period, past/present/future become jumbled, inchoate. The present takes on more urgency as the future shrinks; the past becomes a mix of potential causes of one's present illness or a succession of wasted time; the future is marked in increments of treatment and survival even as “the future” becomes more tenuous.

1. Make incremental advances Grand visions inflated the bubble, so they should not be indulged. Anyone who claims to be able to do something great is suspect, and anyone who wants to change the world should be more humble. Small, incremental steps are the only safe path forward. 2. Stay lean and flexible All companies must be “lean,” which is code for “unplanned.” You should not know what your business will do; planning is arrogant and inflexible. Instead you should try things out, “iterate,” and treat entrepreneurship as agnostic experimentation. 3. Improve on the competition Don’t try to create a new market prematurely. The only way to know you have a real business is to start with an already existing customer, so you should build your company by improving on recognizable products already offered by successful competitors. 4. Focus on product, not sales If your product requires advertising or salespeople to sell it, it’s not good enough: technology is primarily about product development, not distribution. Bubble-era advertising was obviously wasteful, so the only sustainable growth is viral growth.

Already uneasy over the foundations of their subject, mathematicians got a solid dose of ridicule from a clergyman, Bishop George Berkeley (1685-1753). Bishop Berkeley, in his caustic essay 'The Analyst, or a Discourse addressed to an Infidel Mathematician,' derided those mathematicians who were ever ready to criticize theology as being based upon unsubstantiated faith, yet who embraced the calculus in spite of its foundational weaknesses. Berkeley could not resist letting them have it: 'All these points [of mathematics], I say, are supposed and believed by certain rigorous exactors of evidence in religion, men who pretend to believe no further than they can see... But he who can digest a second or third fluxion, a second or third differential, need not, methinks, be squeamish about any point in divinity.' As if that were not devastating enough, Berkeley added the wonderfully barbed comment: 'And what are these fluxions? The velocities of evanescent increments. And what are these same evanescent increments? They are neither finite quantities, nor quantities infinitely small, not yet nothing. May we not call them the ghosts of departed quantities...?' Sadly, the foundations of the calculus had come to this - to 'ghosts of departed quantities.' One imagines hundreds of mathematicians squirming restlessly under this sarcastic phrase. Gradually the mathematical community had to address this vexing problem. Throughout much of the eighteenth century, they had simply been having too much success - and too much fun - in exploiting the calculus to stop and examine its underlying principles. But growing internal concerns, along with Berkeley's external sniping, left them little choice. The matter had to be resolved. Thus we find a string of gifted mathematicians working on the foundational questions. The process of refining the idea of 'limit' was an excruciating one, for the concept is inherently quite deep, requiring a precision of thought and an appreciation of the nature of the real number system that is by no means easy to come by. Gradually, though, mathematicians chipped away at this idea. By 1821, the Frenchman Augustin-Louis Cauchy (1789-1857) had proposed this definition: 'When the values successively attributed to a particular variable approach indefinitely a fixed value, so as to end by differing from it by as little as one wishes, this latter is called the limit of all the others.

(Peter Thiel on Elon Musk) But there is now a degree to which you have to ask whether his success is an indictment on the rest of us who have been working on much more incremental things. To the extent that the world still doubts Elon, I think it's a reflection on the insanity of the world and not on the supposed insanity of Elon.

successful startup solves this conundrum by focusing its development on building the product incrementally and iteratively and targets its early selling efforts on a very small group of early customers who have bought into the startup’s vision. This small group of visionary customers will give the company the feedback necessary to add features into follow-on releases. Enthusiasts for products who spread the good news are often called evangelists. But we need a new word to describe visionary customers—those who will not only spread the good news about unfinished and untested products, but also buy them. I call them earlyvangelists.2

There’s nothing wrong with taking bold action. Life and happiness occasionally demand it. But remember that you hear about people making big changes because this is the exception, not the rule. Narrative drama comes from bold action, not from the incremental progress that leads to sustainable success.

Your teams need the ability—and the manpower—to relentlessly pursue a specific objective; asking a team to split its time between two different business lines is likely to result in the failure of both. This is especially true when the main thread is a business line that has matured. In their Harvard Business Review article “The Ambidextrous Organization,” Charles A. O’Reilly III and Michael L. Tushman draw the distinction between “exploiting” and “exploring.” Mature business lines focus on incremental innovations that help them exploit a well-known market, whereas new threads focus on more radical innovations and exploring a new market opportunity. They examined thirty-five attempts to spin up new threads, across nine different industries. What they found was that these efforts were most likely to be successful in “ambidextrous” organizations, where the new threads were organized as structurally independent units but integrated into the existing management structure. In other words, the leaders of the new threads not only have the freedom to innovate but also the ability to coordinate with senior leadership to leverage existing resources and expertise from more mature threads.

Incrementalism never allows innovation to flourish.

Businesses around the world are reaching the edges of incremental change. For future success, constant small improvements may no longer be enough. This is the time to re-create!

Small changes or stretching a bit more on your tested models may not help you sustain the success you enjoyed in the past.

At times the original model may be at fault given the new set of environmental factors that are in place.

Bureaucratic organizations are inertial, incremental, and dispiriting. In a bureaucracy, the power to initiate change is vested in a few senior leaders. When those at the top fall prey to denial, arrogance, and nostalgia, as they often do, the organization falters. That’s why deep change in a bureaucracy is usually belated and convulsive. Bureaucracies are also innovation-phobic. They are congenitally risk averse, and offer few incentives to those inclined to challenge the status quo. In a bureaucracy, being a maverick is a high-risk occupation. Worst of all, bureaucracies are soul crushing. Deprived of any real influence, employees disconnect emotionally from work. Initiative, creativity, and daring—requisites for success in the creative economy—often get left at home.

SnapTax competes directly with one of Intuit’s flagship products: the fully featured TurboTax desktop software. Usually, companies like Intuit fall into the trap described in Clayton Christensten’s The Innovator’s Dilemma: they are very good at creating incremental improvements to existing products and serving existing customers, which Christensen called sustaining innovation, but struggle to create breakthrough new products—disruptive innovation—that can create new sustainable sources of growth.

research validating Tom’s instincts. When researchers with the National Weight Control Registry examined the tactics used by successful dieters, they found that two characteristics, in particular, stood out. People who successfully maintain weight loss typically eat breakfast every morning. They also weigh themselves each day. Part of the reason why these habits matter is practical: Eating a healthy breakfast makes it less likely you will snack later in the day, according to studies. And frequently measuring your weight allows us—sometimes almost subconsciously—to see how changing our diets influences the pounds lost. But just as important is the mental boost that daily, incremental weight loss provides. The small win of dropping even half a pound can provide the dose of momentum we need to stick with a diet. We need to see small victories to believe a long battle will be won.

There are several reasons, and the way in which the terms “movement” and “organization” are understood by Alinskyites connects to some defining aspects of their model. For Ed Chambers, Alinsky’s successor as IAF director, an aversion to movements is a part of his long-term commitment to community members. As he writes in his book Roots for Radicals, “We play to win. That’s one of the distinctive features of the IAF: We don’t lead everyday, ordinary people into public failures, and we’re not building movements. Movements go in and out of existence. As good as they are, you can’t sustain them. Everyday people need incremental success over months and sometimes years.”11

Investing (and deciding where to work): Value flows from choosing the right sector, team, and product, in that order. Sector: Embrace risk. Be contrarian, and look for disruptive, not incremental, improvements. Team: At our firm, and at our portfolio companies, it is all about the talent. “A” leaders hire A+ talent; “B” leaders hire C talent. Judge people by the team they build. If you are the smartest person in the room, and remain so for more than a few months, start to worry. Product: The tried-and-true way to judge a product’s value is by the customer’s second purchase. Many products are over-engineered, some are too incremental to displace legacy products, and others solve too narrow a problem. The best solutions offer value through simplicity and target the highest priority needs of buyers. In

We called it Notes Day, and I see it as a stellar example of how to set the table for creativity. Managers of creative companies must never forget to ask themselves: “How do we tap the brainpower of our people?” From its genesis to its execution, from the goodwill it engendered to the company-wide changes it set in motion, Notes Day was a success in part because it was based on the idea that fixing things is an ongoing, incremental process. Creative people

Three individuals were involved: the one running the experiment, the subject of the experiment (a volunteer), and a confederate pretending to be a volunteer. These three people fill three distinct roles: the Experimenter (an authoritative role), the Teacher (a role intended to obey the orders of the Experimenter), and the Learner (the recipient of stimulus from the Teacher). The subject and the actor both drew slips of paper to determine their roles, but unknown to the subject, both slips said "teacher". The actor would always claim to have drawn the slip that read "learner", thus guaranteeing that the subject would always be the "teacher". Next, the "teacher" and "learner" were taken into an adjacent room where the "learner" was strapped into what appeared to be an electric chair. The experimenter told the participants this was to ensure that the "learner" would not escape.[1] The "teacher" and "learner" were then separated into different rooms where they could communicate but not see each other. In one version of the experiment, the confederate was sure to mention to the participant that he had a heart condition.[1] At some point prior to the actual test, the "teacher" was given a sample electric shock from the electroshock generator in order to experience firsthand what the shock that the "learner" would supposedly receive during the experiment would feel like. The "teacher" was then given a list of word pairs that he was to teach the learner. The teacher began by reading the list of word pairs to the learner. The teacher would then read the first word of each pair and read four possible answers. The learner would press a button to indicate his response. If the answer was incorrect, the teacher would administer a shock to the learner, with the voltage increasing in 15-volt increments for each wrong answer. If correct, the teacher would read the next word pair.[1] The subjects believed that for each wrong answer, the learner was receiving actual shocks. In reality, there were no shocks. After the confederate was separated from the subject, the confederate set up a tape recorder integrated with the electroshock generator, which played prerecorded sounds for each shock level. After a number of voltage-level increases, the actor started to bang on the wall that separated him from the subject. After several times banging on the wall and complaining about his heart condition, all responses by the learner would cease.[1] At this point, many people indicated their desire to stop the experiment and check on the learner. Some test subjects paused at 135 volts and began to question the purpose of the experiment. Most continued after being assured that they would not be held responsible. A few subjects began to laugh nervously or exhibit other signs of extreme stress once they heard the screams of pain coming from the learner.[1] If at any time the subject indicated his desire to halt the experiment, he was given a succession of verbal prods by the experimenter, in this order:[1] Please continue. The experiment requires that you continue. It is absolutely essential that you continue. You have no other choice, you must go on.

With a new habit, create a goal that’s too small to fail. Stay focused on what you need to do right now and ignore future milestones. Then make tiny, incremental changes. At first, you won’t notice a shift in your habits. However, on a long enough timeline, you’ll develop a permanent change to your routine.

Don’t always try to make big improvements – sometimes small incremental daily improvements are all you need.

Small increments on a daily basis will lead you to monumental results over time. Being consistent is the hallmark of epic performers.

What is the book (or books) you’ve given most as a gift, and why? Or what are one to three books that have greatly influenced your life? Mastery by George Leonard. I first read this book 20 years ago, after reading Leonard’s Esquire article, the seed from which the book grew. Leonard wrote the book to share lessons from becoming an Aikido master teacher, despite starting practice at the advanced age of 47. I raced through its 170-plus pages in a state of almost feverish excitement, so strongly did it affirm our swimming method. The book helped me see swimming as an ideal vehicle for teaching the mastery habits and behaviors closely interwoven with our instruction in the physical techniques of swimming. I love this book because it is as good a guide as I’ve ever seen to a life well lived. A brief summary: Life is not designed to hand us success or satisfaction, but rather to present us with challenges that make us grow. Mastery is the mysterious process by which those challenges become progressively easier and more satisfying through practice. The key to that satisfaction is to reach the nirvana in which love of practice for its own sake (intrinsic) replaces the original goal (extrinsic) as our grail. The antithesis of mastery is the pursuit of quick fixes. My five steps to mastery: Choose a worthy and meaningful challenge. Seek a sensei or master teacher (like George Leonard) to help you establish the right path and priorities. Practice diligently, always striving to hone key skills and to progress incrementally toward new levels of competence. Love the plateau. All worthwhile progress occurs through brief, thrilling leaps forward followed by long stretches during which you feel you’re going nowhere. Though it seems as if we’re making no progress, we are turning new behaviors into habits. Learning continues at the cellular level . . . if you follow good practice principles. Mastery is a journey, not a destination. True masters never believe they have attained mastery. There is always more to be learned and greater skill to be developed.

Mr Imai noted how gradual change was a less obvious part of the Western way of life than it was in Japan, and that Western businesses were less successful because they always sought abrupt and dramatic change over incremental change.

Incremental success is irrelevant in the exponential world. Anything less than radical is meaningless.

Today, the role of a change leader is restricted to the management of incremental changes. What should be the new role of change leaders in an environment which is constantly multiplying its pace of progress?

It requires leaders to design organizations that can succeed in mature businesses where success comes from incremental improvement, close attention to customers, and rigorous execution and to simultaneously compete in emerging businesses where success requires speed, flexibility, and a tolerance for mistakes. We refer to this capability as ambidexterity—the ability to do both. If leaders are the linchpin to success, then ambidexterity is the weapon with which they must do battle. We believe ambidexterity is the key to solving the innovator’s dilemma. How leaders and companies can do this is the story we tell here.

The sad fact seems to be that when a business is successful, the inexorable tendency of managers is to protect that success and incrementally improve existing operations, not to “waste” resources on experiments in small, lower-margin businesses.

AT&T, he believed, should not be in the space business. But all of these concerns may have been magnified by Kelly’s opposition to the kind of innovation that might later be described as “discontinuous.”14 Bell Labs had just completed the successful transatlantic cable; the future of communications to Europe and beyond appeared to reside in new and better cables. These would be incremental innovations. In such a vision of the future, orbiting satellites weren’t only a risky and unproven technology; they were also—at least to a telephone executive with a well-defined, step-by-step ten-year plan for improving the system—a strange sideways leap.

A 15% return with a 10% volatility (or uncertainty) per annum translates into a 93% probability of success in any given year. But seen at a narrow time scale, this translates into a mere 50.02% probability of success over any given second as shown in Table 3.1. Over the very narrow time increment, the observation will reveal close to nothing. Yet the dentist’s heart will not tell him that. Being emotional, he feels a pang with every loss, as it shows in red on his screen. He feels some pleasure when the performance is positive, but not in equivalent amount as the pain experienced when the performance is negative.

Focus beyond the finish line — celebrate incremental progress along the way for sustained motivation!

Focus beyond the finish line — celebrate incremental progress along the way for sustained motivation.

Narrative drama comes from bold action, not from the incremental progress that leads to sustainable success.

The most successful companies today are the ones with the courage to challenge rules, who build themselves on different assumptions, who challenge the status quo, but do so based on the next paradigm, not the last. It is companies who hope to survive by making small incremental changes that now lose out to the ones that bet big on radical innovation and change.

A great analogy for timing your calls is investing. The investor who attempts to time the market has historically failed to beat the investor who uses a dollar-cost-averaging strategy—making incremental investments on a regular schedule over time. If you think about prospecting in the same vein, salespeople who prospect daily on a regular schedule are always more successful over time than those who make the attempt to time their prospecting. Like investing, statistics are always in the favor of the salesperson who does a little bit of prospecting every day.

How do people do it, pry themselves from their pasts? “Pry” makes it sound dramatic, but it isn’t. I wish I could say my life in the natural world began with a transformative experience: like the fishing weekend with my father, only successful. An epiphanic trip to the mountains, a hike along a rushing river that taught me how I wanted to live. But that’s not how it happened. The course of true progress is boring. You don’t just suddenly become an outdoorsman, just as you don’t just suddenly become assertive and independent, ridding yourself forever of your shabby victim rags. It’s incremental. Think of that frog, the one in Karl’s picture. There wasn’t a single moment when he passed into maturity, a single instant when an observer could cry, “Look, he’s a frog now!” No, it happened slowly, beginning with four tiny bumps, four promises of the legs that would widen the world for him beyond anything he could conceive of in his watery tadpole dreams.

In many ways, Washington’s letter to Mason foretells the success of the American Revolution: he tried to be law-abiding, endorsed incremental change, and favored violence only if all else failed. Unlike the French Revolution, the American Revolution started with a series of measured protests by men schooled in self-government, a long, exhaustive search for a diplomatic solution, before moving toward open rebellion. Later on, nothing incensed Washington more than the notion that the colonists had proved unreasonable during the run-up to war.

I’m not trying to hit home runs in negotiations. I’m trying to get one extra hit every nine games. It’s a good lesson for negotiation, and a good lesson for life. A few incremental improvements and you will be fabulously more successful.

Successful innovation is only possible as a result of insights from incremental losses along the way.

The entrepreneurs who stuck with Silicon Valley learned four big lessons from the dot-com crash that still guide business thinking today: 1. Make incremental advances Grand visions inflated the bubble, so they should not be indulged. Anyone who claims to be able to do something great is suspect, and anyone who wants to change the world should be more humble. Small, incremental steps are the only safe path forward. 2. Stay lean and flexible All companies must be “lean,” which is code for “unplanned.” You should not know what your business will do; planning is arrogant and inflexible. Instead you should try things out, “iterate,” and treat entrepreneurship as agnostic experimentation. 3. Improve on the competition Don’t try to create a new market prematurely. The only way to know you have a real business is to start with an already existing customer, so you should build your company by improving on recognizable products already offered by successful competitors. 4. Focus on product, not sales If your product requires advertising or salespeople to sell it, it’s not good enough: technology is primarily about product development, not distribution. Bubble-era advertising was obviously wasteful, so the only sustainable growth is viral growth.

If you hold a clear image of your ideal self as your North Star, you will make incremental life changes that will bring you closer to the meaningful success that you find fulfilling.

The second principle is to embrace radical incrementalism. The psychology professor Robert Boice spent his career studying the writing habits of his fellow academics, reaching the conclusion that the most productive and successful among them generally made writing a smaller part of their daily routine than the others, so that it was much more feasible to keep going with it day after day.

tolerance for failure—both personally and organizationally—is the primary key to unlocking innovation. Smart, well-meaning managers often make small errors in leadership that discourage this kind of risk-taking. Building an organization that encourages and rewards incremental achievement of big goals increases your chances of successful innovation, and reduces the costs of inevitable missteps. That’s the essence of experimentation.

The alternative is to use a system called the Five Whys to make incremental investments and evolve a startup’s processes gradually. The core idea of Five Whys is to tie investments directly to the prevention of the most problematic symptoms.

To avoid these problems, you should be proactive in seeking feedback regularly and routinely. Don’t save up your questions and concerns for one marathon session at the end of the year. You’ll find that taking advice and ideas in small increments is easier for you to digest. When people tell you that you should quit a certain behavior more than once and within different contexts, their point sinks in and you’re more likely to take action on it.

To introduce Five Whys to an organization, it is necessary to hold Five Whys sessions as new problems come up. Since baggage issues are endemic, they naturally come up as part of the Five Whys analysis and you can take that opportunity to fix them incrementally. If they don’t come up organically, maybe they’re not as big as they seem.

Those who go big or go home often end up going home. Those who go incrementally over a long period of time often end up with something big.

The entrepreneurs who stuck with Silicon Valley learned four big lessons from the dot-com crash that still guide business thinking today: 1. Make incremental advances Grand visions inflated the bubble, so they should not be indulged. Anyone who claims to be able to do something great is suspect, and anyone who wants to change the world should be more humble. Small, incremental steps are the only safe path forward. 2. Stay lean and flexible All companies must be “lean,” which is code for “unplanned.” You should not know what your business will do; planning is arrogant and inflexible. Instead you should try things out, “iterate,” and treat entrepreneurship as agnostic experimentation. 3. Improve on the competition Don’t try to create a new market prematurely. The only way to know you have a real business is to start with an already existing customer, so you should build your company by improving on recognizable products already offered by successful competitors. 4. Focus on product, not sales If your product requires advertising or salespeople to sell it, it’s not good enough: technology is primarily about product development, not distribution. Bubble-era advertising was obviously wasteful, so the only sustainable growth is viral growth. These lessons have become dogma in the startup world; those who would ignore them are presumed to invite the justified doom visited upon technology in the great crash of 2000. And yet the opposite principles are probably more correct: 1. It is better to risk boldness than triviality. 2. A bad plan is better than no plan. 3. Competitive markets destroy profits. 4. Sales matters just as much as product.

A few years ago, we engaged a team of experts to determine the “secret sauce” that propelled those rare leaders, organizations, and movements to success. They discovered five principles that are consistently present when transformational breakthroughs take place. To spark this sort of change, you must: 1. Make a Big Bet. So many people and organizations are naturally cautious. They look at what seemed to work in the past and try to do more of it, leading to only incremental advances. Every truly history-making transformation has occurred when people have decided to go for revolutionary change. 2. Be bold, take risks. Have the guts to try new, unproven things and the rigor to continue experimenting. Risk taking is not a blind leap off a cliff but a lengthy process of trial and error. And it doesn’t end with the launch of a product or the start of a movement. You need to be willing to risk the next big idea, even if it means upsetting your own status quo. 3. Make failure matter. Great achievers view failure as a necessary part of advancing toward success. No one seeks it out, but if you’re trying new things, the outcome is by definition uncertain. When failure happens, great innovators make the setback matter, applying the lessons learned and sharing them with others. 4. Reach beyond your bubble. Our society is in thrall to the myth of the lone genius. But innovation happens at intersections. Often the most original solutions come from engaging with people with diverse experiences to forge new and unexpected partnerships. 5. Let urgency conquer fear. Don’t overthink and overanalyze. It’s natural to want to study a problem from all angles, but getting caught up in questions like “What if we’re wrong?” and “What if there is a better way?” can leave you paralyzed with fear. Allow the compelling need to act to outweigh all doubts and setbacks. These five principles can be summarized in two words: Be Fearless.

They apply this to all forms of energy—mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical—and offer up some very practical routines you can immediately install into your working life. For example, they tell us that since the human body is designed to work most effectively in ninety-minute increments, you should discipline yourself to get up after an hour and a half’s work and walk around, breathe deeply, take a break. No matter how engaged you are in finishing a project or writing an e-mail, when the ninety-minute bell sounds, stop your work, walk around, breathe deeply, take a break. I’ve found this to be extremely valuable advice. In fact, I am trying to discipline myself to write this book as a series of sprints. I don’t know if it will make the book any better, but it sure seems to leave me with more energy at the end of the day.

Any general movement is made up of hundreds of small contractile movements, each one arranged in a closely timed sequence to contribute its increment to a smooth and controlled gesture. These small local contractions are generated by the stimulation of the alpha motor neurons in the spinal cord which connect to their individual motor units. It appears to be the job of the basal ganglia to orchestrate the basic selection of the appropriate motor neurons, initiate their stimulations in the proper sequence, and direct their precise timing. Some of these movement patterns, such as swallowing, are fully established in the basal ganglia at birth; others, such as walking, are the result of long years of practice. Each of these ganglia seem to add a specific quality to any general movement, qualities that are notably absent or exaggerated when the activity of one of the ganglia is out of balance with the others. A few examples will help to indicate how each ganglia adds its organizational component to a successfully controlled movement.

Correlation is enough,” 2 then-Wired editor in chief Chris Anderson famously declared in 2008. We can, he implied, solve innovation problems by the sheer brute force of the data deluge. Ever since Michael Lewis chronicled the Oakland A’s unlikely success in Moneyball (who knew on-base percentage was a better indicator of offensive success than batting averages?), organizations have been trying to find the Moneyball equivalent of customer data that will lead to innovation success. Yet few have. Innovation processes in many companies are structured and disciplined, and the talent applying them is highly skilled. There are careful stage-gates, rapid iterations, and checks and balances built into most organizations’ innovation processes. Risks are carefully calculated and mitigated. Principles like six-sigma have pervaded innovation process design so we now have precise measurements and strict requirements for new products to meet at each stage of their development. From the outside, it looks like companies have mastered an awfully precise, scientific process. But for most of them, innovation is still painfully hit or miss. And worst of all, all this activity gives the illusion of progress, without actually causing it. Companies are spending exponentially more to achieve only modest incremental innovations while completely missing the mark on the breakthrough innovations critical to long-term, sustainable growth. As Yogi Berra famously observed: “We’re lost, but we’re making good time!” What’s gone so wrong? Here is the fundamental problem: the masses and masses of data that companies accumulate are not organized in a way that enables them to reliably predict which ideas will succeed. Instead the data is along the lines of “this customer looks like that one,” “this product has similar performance attributes as that one,” and “these people behaved the same way in the past,” or “68 percent of customers say they prefer version A over version B.” None of that data, however, actually tells you why customers make the choices that they do.

learned four big lessons from the dot-com crash that still guide business thinking today: 1. Make incremental advances Grand visions inflated the bubble, so they should not be indulged. Anyone who claims to be able to do something great is suspect, and anyone who wants to change the world should be more humble. Small, incremental steps are the only safe path forward. 2. Stay lean and flexible All companies must be “lean,” which is code for “unplanned.” You should not know what your business will do; planning is arrogant and inflexible. Instead you should try things out, “iterate,” and treat entrepreneurship as agnostic experimentation. 3. Improve on the competition Don’t try to create a new market prematurely. The only way to know you have a real business is to start with an already existing customer, so you should build your company by improving on recognizable products already offered by successful competitors. 4. Focus on product, not sales If your product requires advertising or salespeople to sell it, it’s not good enough: technology is primarily about product development, not distribution. Bubble-era advertising was obviously wasteful, so the only sustainable growth is viral growth.

We overcome the fears resulting from uncertainty by celebrating incremental success.

Tae Kwon Do is a wonderful example of the Japanese concept, Kaizen, which I believe is a foundational practice for success in any and every aspect of life. Kaizen is the idea that small incremental improvements add up over time to yield big results. It’s simple, it’s powerful, and it works.

This series of events indicate the most fundamental of all rules in progress, that taking small incremental steps surely determines Success

The Innovator’s Dilemma: they are very good at creating incremental improvements to existing products and serving existing customers, which Christensen called sustaining innovation, but struggle to create breakthrough new products—disruptive innovation—that can create new sustainable sources of growth.