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“Before you disturb the system in any way, watch how it behaves.”
Donella Meadows
Coke swapped a recipe that worked and 40,000 people wrote in to complain.
You’ve fixed something that already worked and made it worse. So have I.
I run 21 experiments a day and most of them fail.
Failing most of the time is fine. I can’t tell which one pays until I run it.
The costly ones are the changes I made to something that was already working.
A few habits I keep frozen on purpose. Touch them and they get worse, each time.
The bicycle was a mess of guesses for most of the 1800s. Riders perched high above the road on a giant front wheel, the penny-farthing, one pothole from pitching over the bars.
The pedals bolted straight to that wheel.
Builders tried each shape they could dream up.
Then in 1885 John Kemp Starley built the Rover:
- two equal wheels
- a chain to the rear
- a diamond frame
Builders stopped guessing.
Ride a bike today and you’re on his design, near enough. The triangle underneath is Starley’s.
141 years later the frame still holds.
Try to improve that frame and you find each piece already earns its place.
Any change now takes something away.
The honeycomb landed on one shape too. A honeycomb is wall-to-wall hexagons and the hexagon is the cheapest way to divide a surface into equal cells: least wax, most honey.
People suspected this for more than 2,000 years. Marcus Terentius Varro wrote it down in 36 BC and Pappus of Alexandria is credited with it too.
The proof held out until 1999, when the mathematician Thomas Hales finally showed the hexagon wins.
The bicycle got its shape by trial and so did the honeycomb.
Hives varied from one generation to the next. The ones that spent less wax on walls left more descendants. The hexagon is what came through that filter.
In April 1985 Coca-Cola replaced a recipe that stood for 99 years.
Roughly 190,000 blind taste tests said the new one tasted better. They pulled the old recipe off the shelf.
Then the letters and the phone calls started, 8,000 calls a day at the peak.
The old recipe came back as Coca-Cola Classic and you can buy it today.
New Coke still ranks among the biggest product flops in business history. The recipe was finished, with nothing left worth changing. They changed it anyway.
Your keyboard never got finished and it stayed anyway. It has been the standard since the 1870s and it was never the fastest layout.
Christopher Sholes spread the common letters apart to keep the typebars of a mechanical typewriter from clashing, then the world kept his layout long after the jams were gone.
It survives on the cost of switching.
Meditation is the one I guard most.
For about 15 years I kept changing it. Past some point the changes only made it worse.
So I stopped fighting it.
I meditate the same way each morning now and I leave it alone.
Early on, change is how you make a thing better. Later, leaving it alone is how you keep it good. The hard part is knowing when a thing is finished.
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What could you stop tweaking and start relying on?
