“Success is gained, not by talent, but by sheer determination.”
If you’ve ever watched the television show Shark Tank, you may have noticed something obvious. Not every great idea gets accepted by the sharks. Of all the people applying to get on the show – approximately 45,000 each year – less than 1% ever make it on the program and get a shot at the sharks. And even a smaller number of those that actually get on the program ever get accepted and funded by one of the investors.
What is it that makes the difference? One might be tempted to assume that investors make funding decisions based upon the innovation and creativity of the idea or product. And that is true in many cases. Apple computers, Facebook, Instagram, and many other revolutionary technologies and “ideas” have transformed the world. But an idea by itself isn’t enough. Mary Kay Ash, the founder of Mary Kay Cosmetics is quoted as saying “Ideas are a dime a dozen, people who implement them are priceless.”
There’s a deep truth in that statement. It’s the people. Many people today are infatuated with the “golden idea.” It’s that concept that if we just could come up with a great product or a great idea, it would translate into huge success and millions of dollars. The reality is that many of the most successful Shark Tank investments are not original ideas, but rather pedestrian businesses built by passionate people. Socks, BBQ, cupcakes, sweaters, and sponges represent some of the biggest ROI in the show’s history.
Rather than commit to the discipline and commitment necessary to achieve success, we become infatuated with a quick fix – the “golden idea.” I once heard a statement from a financial planner that has stuck with me throughout my life:
“Ed McMahon is not coming to knock on your door”
If you’re familiar with the Publisher’s Clearing House Sweepstakes of days past, television commercials showed Ed McMahon in his celebrity days, knocking on people’s doors and handing them checks for millions of dollars simply for subscribing to a lottery. The point that this advisor was making is that if you’re waiting on some lottery to make your fortune, or for lady luck to bring you a treasure trove of success, you’re going to be waiting a long time.
As Andy Dufresne stated in The Shawshank Redemption, “Get busy living or get busy dying.” This is a wakeup call. If you want to succeed, you must, you must, you must get busy working toward that success, and the first step is the hardest. I call it overcoming the threshold of inconvenience.
The Threshold of Inconvenience
This principle – overcoming the threshold of inconvenience – applies to just about everything in life, and if you can figure out how to do it, it will make your life more enjoyable, it will bring you greater fulfillment, and you will find greater success. The problem is that it’s just so hard to do and there’s no shortcut.
Here’s the principle in its most basic form: the first obstacle to overcome in almost every situation has to do with inconvenience. How is it that we let small tasks, things that are not difficult or necessarily challenging, to just linger around and not get done? Most likely it’s because accomplishing that “easy” task usually involves something that’s inconvenient to do at the moment.
Maybe we hold off trimming the lawn because we would have to go out and get gas for the trimmer. Not difficult. Not hard. Just inconvenient. So the trimming doesn’t get done until it becomes absolutely necessary, i.e. the grass has grown two feet tall in those areas. But here’s what happens. Now, the task becomes greater. It becomes more difficult to trim because we procrastinated due to the fact that we didn’t want to get in the car and go get gas.
Many companies deal with this in the use of their products. If it’s too complex to navigate, or too confusing to use, people just won’t use it. Years ago, a friend and I created (truthfully, he designed and built it and I just provided the ideas and testing) a web-based communication tool for people to send messages to their constituents on their own time frame. The goal was to overcome lost messaging in an avalanche of content already present on social media feeds. The big tech companies use algorithms to select your content for you, we tried to create a product where you would select what you wanted to get and when (a specific time) you would get it.
The problem? It was extremely challenging to make the UI easy to use. The result. Content providers found it too inconvenient to set up and use and we couldn’t get customers. The cost and effort to overcome the inconvenience for users became too difficult without funding so the project stalled. I learned a valuable lesson. Inconvenience can kill your product.
This doesn’t just work with things that are easy, it works equally well with difficult things. This isn’t to say that we don’t accomplish difficult things in life, just that when we do, we have to take the first step across the threshold of inconvenience to do so. And this applies to everything. The first step to any accomplishment involves crossing the threshold of inconvenience.
I have a theory (just a theory and no proof that this is an actual corporate strategy but it seems too common to think that it’s not the case with many companies) that companies use this same principle against consumers when it comes to facilitating complaints and refunds. They make it just a little too inconvenient to navigate the process of complaining about something and asking for a refund to the point that people just give up.
Here’s a personal example, my cell phone carrier (name withheld) charged me for international charges that were supposed to be covered under the international plan that I ordered. This, even after I called and asked beforehand if those countries would be covered under the plan and they told me that they would. Well, it took me 3 hours on the phone talking with 3 different people, explaining the whole situation in its entirety to each of them, only to get the “higher” manager to call me back within 48 hours. Who never called, by the way. And, quite honestly, at this point, it’s easy to give up because of the inconvenience of going through that process again.
Of course, you might say that I should switch carriers. But the effort involved in switching everything out is inconvenient. Most people would just pay the bill because it’s easier and it automatically comes out in autopay. (Update: I called back again for another hour and a half and am waiting for a possible resolution – fingers crossed. I almost didn’t because of the inconvenience but I forced myself to go through it again.)
This isn’t great customer service, mind you, but it usually accomplishes its purpose the majority of the time because, as I just mentioned, it takes a lot of effort to go out and switch everything around. I had an advertising professor tell me once that advertising isn’t as much about getting new customers as it is about keeping the customers you already have. Why? Because it’s easier (more convenient) to keep existing customers than it is to go out and put in all the effort to get new ones.
Think of this in terms of habits. We do things that are habitual because they are easy to do. We just do them automatically out of habit and it takes minimal effort. However, it takes a great amount of effort, physical and mental to break an old habit and establish a new one. The inconvenience of the amount of effort needed to break a bad habit keeps us from doing it because it’s easier and more convenient to just let “nature” take its course.
This is why we don’t exercise – it’s easier to just sit there. Why we don’t eat right – the foods that are good for you require a lot of effort in preparation and cost more while the crap foods are easy to make and cheap. Why most New Year’s resolutions fail – the habits have already established themselves and it requires a lot of effort to change them and establish new ones. The same problem applies in all of these situations – it’s not easy to get started. As a wise person once said:
“The hardest step in any journey is the first one.”
Strategies to Overcome The Threshold of Inconvenience
So, how do we fix this situation? How do we solve the dilemma of overcoming the threshold of inconvenience? I have two suggestions:
1. Strategic Environmental Change (S.E.C.)
For this to work, it’s essential to understand the reality of our relationship with our mediated environment. Winston Churchill once said, referring to the rebuilding of the English House of Commons after its destruction by German bombing during WW2, “We shape our buildings, and our buildings then shape us.”
What he recognized was the unique ability that we have as human beings to construct and mold the environments around us, but more importantly, the fact that those environments then, in turn, shape and mold us into their image. He noted that when we build a building, how it’s built – the design, the aesthetic, the ways the offices are built in relation to each other, the common spaces, the hallways, the bathrooms, even where the water fountains are placed –has a formative effect upon the people and the organization which operates within that building.
Hierarchies are formed based upon architecture. Power is established due to office layout. Culture is created and strengthened (for good or bad) based upon aesthetic and design. The environment “shapes” the people who work and live within it.
This isn’t just about buildings but it works with every “media” that we have in our lives. In defining a media, I’m referring to something that mediates or “comes between” us and our world. These can be our homes, our technologies, our language, our automobiles or modes of transport, or anything else we use in life.
The Ability of Humans to Adapt
One of the fascinating things about human beings is how we adapt to our environment. When the environment changes around us, it forces us to adapt to it. I look at it as a principle of greater mass. When two forces come against one another, usually the force with less mass must make way for the one with greater. In other words, the force with less mass must adapt to the greater force.
In terms of our environment, the world around us typically holds “greater mass” than any individual does. We must adapt to our environment because we don’t usually have the power to force our environment to adapt to us. You can’t make the New York subway operate on your schedule. If you want to ride the subway, you must adapt yourself to its schedule. If you choose not to, you will be walking to work.
In light of these principless, we have a unique opportunity to strategically change or structure our environment so that it forces us to change, to adapt, and to overcome the thresholds of inconvenience we face. For a simple example, if you have trouble waking up in the morning, put your phone (I use my phone as an alarm clock) in another room and connect it to a Bluetooth speaker. That way, when it goes off in the morning, you can’t just turn over and hit snooze, you actually have to get up, go into another room, and shut it off. By the time you get to the phone, you have already crossed the threshold of inconvenience for getting out of bed, and now it’s easier to actually stay up than it is to reset the alarm and crawl back into bed.
When you do things like this, you structure your environment in such a way that forces you to adapt to it (to the greater mass), which, in turn, accomplishes the purposes you hope to achieve. It’s not always this simple but, as human beings, we can find “unique” and creative ways to use these principles to constructively change our lives.
Here’s another suggestion (which, admittedly, is a bit more radical and probably unrealistic for many). If you want to run a mile each morning before you go to work, park your car a mile away from your house. Then, the only way to get to work is to run the mile in the morning to get your car. Here again, you are purposefully structuring your environment so that you are forced to adapt to it and, in doing so, you accomplish the thing you want to actually accomplish. Now, I realize this suggestion is a little “out there” and obviously has other problems to consider, but the point here is not to get you to park your car a mile away, but to illustrate how you can find creative ways to structure your environment so you are forced to adapt to it and overcome the threshold of inconvenience.
Strategic environmental change can be implemented in almost anything if you use your creativity. Don’t want to overspend on lunch, leave the credit cards at home and bring only the cash you want to spend. Watching too much Netflix, put your TV on a timer (or remove it altogether). Want to go to the gym more, schedule your last meeting of the day at the gym (who says you can’t have a meeting while walking on treadmills??).
In all of these instances, strategic environmental change works to build the 2nd step:
2. Establish new habits.
Again, the things we do habitually seem easy because we are used to doing them and we do them automatically. The reality is that, at the beginning, when the habit was being developed, there was either an inconvenience to overcome or an environment that forced the adaptation to the eventual habitual behavior. I don’t want to go into too much depth on habits in this article (James Clear has done a great job of this in his book Atomic Habits) but it’s important to know how powerful habits can be and how you can harness that power to achieve what you want.
Again, habits work because we have already adapted our behavior. The challenge is to find ways to develop the habit in the first place because once it’s established, the inconvenience of the behavior is removed and the new behavior happens automatically. Strategic Environmental Change (S.E.C.) can be one way to force yourself to start to adopt new habits.
Conclusion
Behavior is arguably the most important factor in achievement. People can talk all they want about mindset (and I do on this blog) but if mindset or thinking doesn’t translate into action, there will be no achievement. Strategic Environmental Change is one way to force behavior change by taking the all-important first step and overcoming the threshold of inconvenience. Give it a try and let me know how it goes in the comments.
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