The myth of doing “that one thing”

I wonder if this is a cultural issue. People have become used to the idea that taking one (usually small) action will have an outsized impact.

Don't like the political environment? Voting for the right presidential candidate will fix it.

Overweight and out of shape? This pill will do the trick.

Don't want to do the years of hard work to achieve excellence in your field? Just be at the right place at the right time and get "discovered" (or "funded").

To me personally this is at once trite and also a point desperately worth making to the wider public. There's something about the story-telling nature of humanity that makes "that one thing" such a pervasive myth. The written word just doesn't do well at encapsulating the daily grind of thousands of tiny decisions that shape a product to slowly converge on success.

While a precious few products may in fact be a tinder box just waiting for TechCrunch to blow them up, I don't think you stand much chance of success if that's the standard you set for yourself.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, no one can argue with the idea that it takes a ton of work in many different areas to create a successful business. However, this doesn't mean that there's no such thing as a tipping point.

In my experience, many of my projects build on each other, and in many cases the true benefit of each project isn't clear until some critical mass of other projects have also been completed. For example, I spent the first few months of my business making what I thought was a pretty good product, but when I launched it, no one signed up. It turns out that my landing page sucked, I did a terrible job of onboarding the user, and the product didn't come with the right default settings. All of those things were important, but when I finished the last one, all of a sudden free trial users started turning into subscribers. That final project wasn't actually "that one thing" but it looked that way because it was the straw that broke the camels back.

So yes, there's probably not a "one thing" that will be responsible for taking you to the next level, but there will possibly be "one thing" that puts the finishing touch on a massive body of prior work. I think that's the dream that many of us use as motivation for pushing through the tough times at a startup.

Jim Collins talks about this in "Good to Great." He likens business success to a flywheel that takes a lot of effort to get moving but seems to almost spin by itself once in motion. You usually can't point to one particular decision that was "the" push that made it spin, just lots and lots of little things that worked in aggregate.

It was April 2012. We just lost 3 large wholesale clients that were responsible for 80% of our revenue. Our online sales were dropping. We had reached 3k/wk in online sales at our peak but in the few months prior we steadily dropped down to $500/wk. We were falling apart. I was advocating for giving up on our shopify and focusing on more wholesale sales to retailers. My partner was convinced we should build a larger online audience.

He went on a few forums and started pitching our products. The next day we had 10x the sales we had the day before. We're hovering around 4-5.5k/week since then.

I have many anecdotes that all tell the same story: About 90-95% of the things we try don't work. The remaining 5-10% of our initiatives lead to huge boosts in sales.

A very well known counterexample to the article is the 37signals Highrise redesign. Changing the site design lead to a 103% increase in paid signups (http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2991-behind-the-scenes-ab-tes...).

Now I think we should be a bit more rigorous here. There are two parts to making money selling a product/service. There is customer acquisition and customer retention. These examples focus on customer acquisition. I think it would be much harder to keep customers 5x longer than it is to get 5x the customers to purchase your product.

Great article. You should also check out Joel's posts about 'overnight success' which imho have a related message:

http://joel.is/tagged/achieving-overnight-success

The buffer guys do a great job to communicate what success means and what the many many 'one' steps in between look like. Much needed angle in a world that craves for easy sensations. Keep rocking!

I can totally relate to the point, and know exactly how it feels. But I also feel like 'that one thing' is often a motivator and gives you something to focus on, it also helps bring the team together to focus on doing that "massive amount of work," by giving a clean and easily digestible direction for your efforts.

It usually is just a few things that make a difference. The rest are "table stakes". They're required to succeed but they don't differentiate you from everyone else.

Definitely agree with the comments here. One thing to add is I think some of this comes down to ex-ante versus ex-post thinking. Ex-ante, many things are required to make any substantial change. Ex-post, we can scrutinize and analyze and sometimes create a version of history that points to one as the key factor. As others have pointed out, sometimes this is simply a top of the stack situation (last piece of effort is most important but would be true for whatever is last) and sometimes it's a genuine catalytic change (the last thing really was the biggest). But since our decision-making about the future is fundamentally ex-ante, there usually is no silver bullet. Also ex-post analyses are often based upon human surveys / analysis, which is highly flawed. If you ask people, for example, why they love a certain product, they may respond with one feature and you might think that was the "that one thing" when in reality, they might love the overall experience, branding, support or something else entirely.

People are always looking for a shortcut. There are no shortcuts. If you put the time in you might get lucky and get that breakthrough.

But people confuse that one thing with success. If I do X I will get the same result. But without putting in the time the breakthrough never comes.

I'm not sure I agree with this. I've seen enough personally that I believe there is such a thing as a tipping point. That doesn't mean wild success on the first try, and in fact many people never reach it, but it definitely exists. There's some combination of luck and trying enough different ideas that eventually you may "strike gold".

When I was a musician we had a saying: "Playing and performing are like food and water. Writing is breathing." - You play, you promote. You maintain, you sustain. - You write, you build. You create, you grow. Buffer will succeed by building and improving, not maintaining and sustaining.