Instead of seeking new, unproven strategies, businesses should focus on massively scaling activities that already work. This approach leverages a known variable, minimizing the risk of failure associated with change and offering the most predictable path to growth.
Optimizers seek the best ratio of input to output, often capping their scale. Maximizers focus on total output, willing to accept lower efficiency (diminishing returns) to achieve a larger absolute result. In competitive markets, the absolute result is what determines the winner.
The lifestyle required to be in the top 0.01% is incompatible with a normal life. It involves sacrifices that friends and family will view as unhealthy or illogical. True exceptionalism requires rejecting societal norms and the people who uphold them, without needing to explain yourself.
Maximum growth occurs during 'boring' periods of repetitive execution, not exciting periods of innovation. Many leaders, craving novelty, mistake this valuable stability for stagnation and prematurely introduce disruptive changes that hurt the compounding returns of a team mastering its craft.
Implementing changes introduces disruption and retraining, causing a predictable short-term performance decline of around 20%. This 'cost of change' means leaders should reject incremental improvements and only pursue initiatives with a potential upside that vastly outweighs this guaranteed initial loss.
Instead of taking profit and paying taxes, a business can reinvest that capital into a growth driver, like hiring. This investment reduces taxable income while dramatically increasing the company's profit potential, leading to a much larger, tax-efficient gain in enterprise value.
When founders claim a proven but labor-intensive channel 'doesn't scale,' they often misdiagnose a resourcing problem. The bottleneck isn't the channel's viability but their inability to solve the operational challenge of hiring, training, and managing a team to execute that channel at massive volume.