“Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions.” Epictetus
You want to start a business. Or apply for a job. Each time, you feel you should know more first.
A subscriber wrote to me after Consistent But No Progress? It’s the Hurdle Rate, looking for the hurdle rate that gets them there. The catch is small and easy to miss. A goal doesn’t have a hurdle rate.
The goal is the wrong place to look. “Start a business” and “get the job” are outcomes. They sit outside your control. You can do everything right and the business still folds. You can be the best candidate and still lose the role. You can’t put a hurdle rate on any of that. So bring it into your control. Break the goal into the habits that move you toward it.
Say the goal is the new job. The habits that feed it might be:
- Ship one portfolio piece a week
- Run one mock interview a week
- Send three cold intros a week
Each habit has a minimum input it needs to clear the entropy working against it. Below that line, you lose ground. Above it, the habit compounds. That line is its hurdle rate. And unlike the goal, that’s a rate you can clear.
One habit works for almost any goal: running experiments. It matters most when the destination is uncertain, like building a business. You can’t know in advance whether the business works. So you make running experiments a daily habit and pathfind your way there. Two a day. Three. Read the long version in the Experiments book.
Each experiment is an attempt. The attempt is yours even when the result belongs to chance. Whether you try is in your control. Whether it works out is not. So you stop staking your readiness on the outcome and start staking it on the attempts. You run enough experiments that applying is just the next one.
One more thing about a habit’s hurdle rate. It can move. The minimum input can rise. AI is one example. It can open a field to more people. When the crowd grows, the bar to stand out climbs. Where you sit decides how much. A bigger city can raise it. A bigger ambition can raise it. The three cold intros a week that cleared the line last year might take ten this year, because more people are sending them now. So you re-check the number now and then and keep paying above it.
A goal has no hurdle rate. Only habits do. So find the habits beneath your goal and clear their rates. For a destination as uncertain as a business, make experimenting one of them.
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Which habits move you closer to your goal?
