Going back to fundamentals - they matter most

As humans, we seek complexity, often with the noble aim of reducing our discontent and increasing overall satisfaction. Complexity means adding layers of mind-made artifacts on top of the fundamentals because the fundamentals do not seem enough anymore. In business, this can take the form of stacking short-term sales tactics in an attempt to attract more buyers and increase revenues. Complexity can manifest itself through hiring many people and building a vast team in the hope of increasing revenues. Nothing inherently wrong with those decisions, as far as I am concerned.

The perspective I am taking in this post is the one of complexity. Those things add layers of complexity to your life. When thinking about them (i.e., the examples above, or any complexity-adding decision in general), they can feel appealing because of the main promise they carry with them (more money, more power, more fame). When it comes to decisions, however, there are second-, third-, and nth-order effects that may not be immediately visible but exist nonetheless.

That is why it can be a good practice to write up how your daily life would change when you incorporate a new decision into it. If you decide to expand your business and build a team of 10 people, what would that imply in your daily life for the next 3 months, 1 year, 5 years, and more? How is your schedule affected by this decision? Would you enjoy the activities required to sustain the decision? Which activities/new tasks would be required daily for you? What boundaries will need to be in place for the decision to work out positively? What does success and failure look like? What is the worst and the best case scenario?

This idea applies to your life and any organization’s life too — because, particularly when times are prosperous, you can be tempted to make decisions with an irrationally positive outlook driven by the current circumstances, and you are pulled by expectations around you to take the default path of expansion, adding more, scaling your activities. This is okay if it is what you want. It can also be a trap if you have not considered what you want in detail. As posited by the Levels team, organizations (and every one of us) tend toward entropy—i.e., chaos, disorder—and arguably the most important task of your life, whether it be running a business or just your personal life, is to keep homeostasis (a good balance of order and chaos) and prevent entropy from jeopardizing everything around you.

This idea ties into the “process” and “effort” success archetypes from Dr. Gio Valiante. You can achieve success through consistent, diligent effort over a long period. Without needing exceptional stunts or short-term bursts of effort in the hopes of skyrocketing your growth, but with a long-term perspective and playing the infinite game of doing what you say you do, with high integrity and quality of output, with a good process behind your efforts. This concept reminds me of some Eastern philosophies emphasizing craftsmanship and mindful work (e.g., Swordmanship, Kintsugi).

For me as a service business, for example, the fundamentals are the value of the work output, the human relationships, the care I take in the process of delivering projects, and solving the core problems/hopes of my partners. Those are of utmost importance and what I need to focus on first and foremost consistently in the long term. Other shorter-term changes (e.g., marketing/sales tactics, new trends shifting the areas of focus of my work) are relevant but fleeting by their very nature. They are meant to help me stay relevant while I maintain the course of my actions and deliver great service to others.