by Param Jaggi–Founder of Agora, an AI search engine for e-commerce products
As the end of the year approaches, we’re all thinking about the annual goals we set out for our companies. Some were achieved and others were forgotten.
But what if I told you that you had to hit your annual goal by December 31st at midnight or I’d put a bullet in your head? Not to be dramatic but hear me out for a minute. What if I told you that your life depends on hitting the goal? How would you operate?
Operating Like Your Life Depends on It
My guess is that you’d scratch, crawl, fight, and do literally whatever it took to achieve the goal. You would work both smarter and harder. For sales, you would reach out to 100 leads per day until the point of pure exhaustion. For engineering, you wouldn’t leave your computer until that feature is shipped to perfection. You wouldn’t “wait for next week” to get something done, you’d do it now. You wouldn’t waste time or delegate, you’d get it done immediately.
So look, I don’t think we need to be that extreme when running a startup. But I do think it’s a good mental exercise to understand what more we could be doing: what would you be doing differently if your life depended on it? I find that there’s a difference between what we think is our maximum capacity to execute and our actual capacity. To realize that capacity, you have to place artificial constraints on yourself to get there.
Navy Seals call this the 40% rule. When your mind is telling you that you’re done, you’re really only 40% done. You still have another 60% left in the tank. If your life depends on it, you’d use all 60%. The argument I’m making is that we can achieve remarkable things by just unlocking a few more percentage points.
Why Do We Become Complacent at Work?
The question is: why do we become complacent at work?
First, I think it’s tough to push yourself when you’re not compensated well. This applies to founders and employees. It’s in terms of salary, equity, personal flexibility, and most importantly being a part of a high performing team. At the end of the day, we all want to be on a winning team. We’re willing to put in more if we see there are A-players by our side doing the same.
Second, our life becomes de-risked as we get older, thus creating complacency. When we were young, we were inexperienced, broke, and hungry. Over the years, as you make more money and grow a family, the tendency changes to operate more risk-free. Even after hitting a goal or selling a company, it takes a special breed of person to have success, then wake up the next day and execute harder.
Jeff Bezos describes this concept as Day 1 mentality. It’s always day 1. As he says, “Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.”
In economics, this is the concept of ‘regression toward the mean’. Regression toward the mean is the statistical phenomenon that independent events have a tendency to get closer to the average of the entire dataset.
In simple terms, this concept means that things are never as good or as bad as they seem. If you’re having a good day, you’ll likely have an average day tomorrow and it’ll seem like a bad day compared to the previous one. If you’re having a bad day, you’ll likely have an average day tomorrow and it’ll seem like a good day compared to the previous one. Human nature is to get comfortable if you’re having a good day which is why people like Jeff Bezos refer to every day as “Day 1”.
I know what you’re thinking.
Why does all of this have to be so dramatic?
Dramatics Reap Rewards
Well, we all chose to be a part of a startup. We actively chose to live a life of more risk but more reward. So we can’t be operating with the same mentality as the average knowledge worker. A head coach for a middle school basketball team doesn’t operate the same way as a professional athlete in the NBA. Both are playing basketball but one of them requires you to exhaust yourself mentally and physically to achieve goals. If you want to be exceptional, this is what it takes. But just like everything else in life, it’s about constant readjustment and finding the right equilibrium that works for you.
Param Jaggi, CEO of Agora, a search engine for e-commerce products that prioritizes small businesses. He is a dynamic inventor and entrepreneur known for his passion for environmental sustainability and technological innovation. Prior to leading Agora, he founded and ran two successful e-commerce ventures, selling tens of thousands of units.
