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TLDR
After hitting and failing to hit some goals this year - here's some reflections:- The cost of achieving the same outcomes keeps rising, so improvement is the only rational response.
- If you can’t beat inflation yet, focus on outperforming your own past results and stack small wins.
- Use Minimal Viable Performance in lower-priority areas to avoid burnout from over-optimization.
Outperforming Inflation
Something I’ve been thinking about a lot is the idea of outperforming inflation.
We live in a world where it’s easy to complain, and to be fair, things have objectively become harder. Take housing. In much of the West, the multiple of annual income required to buy a home used to be around 3x. Now it’s closer to 30x within roughly 30 years. That’s almost a 10x shift per decade.
You see the same pattern in business. Years ago, you could send sales messages to potential new clients on Upwork and Fiverr for free. Today, Fiverr is inbound only and last year I spent over $5,000 on Upwork connects to send messages. The baseline effort to achieve identical results has increased.
Inflation, at its core, is the rising cost of goods and services. In practice, it also applies to outcomes. The effort, skill, and leverage required to produce the same result increases year by year.
This is why it’s unhelpful when people with experience dismiss these changes and say everything is fine. In many cases, they’re no longer operating at ground level. They’re referencing old data points and haven’t personally felt the increased friction in today’s environment or they're more established to where the rising costs don't impact them.
What matters more is what to do about it.
If the environment has become 10 percent harder year on year, then you need to improve by 20 percent year on year. You don’t have to enjoy this reality. But it will always outperform complaining about it.
Outperforming Your Previous Performance
A fair question is what happens if you can’t keep up with inflation yet.
That’s realistic. You might not be skilled enough to keep pace, let alone get ahead. There’s no shame in that. Everyone starts from zero.
If that’s your situation, your only job is to outperform your previous performance. You don’t need to worry about inflation yet. You just need progress.
For example, if you’ve never made more than $500 in a month from freelance or side income, your next milestone is simple. Make $550. That’s it. You’ve beaten your prior baseline.
Stack enough of these improvements and you eventually reach a position where outperforming inflation becomes realistic.
Minimal Viable Performance
There’s a third option, and it’s still far better than complaining. This is something I use a lot: Minimal Viable Performance.
You might recognize the idea from tech, where people talk about a Minimal Viable Product. The logic is similar. You accept that trying to outperform inflation in every area of life or business is exhausting and unsustainable. Instead, you define the minimum acceptable standard for that area.
Take operations. You might decide that perfection is unnecessary. Your goal becomes a system that works reliably, even if it isn’t elegant.
Or marketing. You might decide you don’t need omnipresence. You focus on one or two channels that are “good enough” to maintain visibility and pipeline.
Or income. You might decide you don’t want to chase hyper-growth. Instead, you define the income level that supports a good life in your city and build a business that reliably sustains that number without excess complexity.
These are conscious trade-offs, not excuses.
The Combined Strategy
In my view, the way to make the 2020s workable is a combination of three things:
Outperform inflation where you can.
Outperform your past self when you can’t.
Apply minimal viable performance where full optimization would burn you out.
That combination is what makes progress sustainable and life a good life sustainably in an environment where the baseline keeps rising.
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