{"id":2226,"date":"2011-09-12T14:03:24","date_gmt":"2011-09-12T21:03:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/blog\/?p=2226"},"modified":"2018-04-04T02:20:46","modified_gmt":"2018-04-04T09:20:46","slug":"single-flaw","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/blog\/2011\/09\/12\/single-flaw\/","title":{"rendered":"The &#8220;Single Flaw&#8221; Fallacy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A mistake I\u2019ve made too often, is falling into \u201csingle flaw\u201d thinking. This is where you spend time trying to find the single cause for your lack of success in some complex problem.<\/p>\n<p>For example, in the first couple years of trying to start a business, I was struggling to make an income. In that frustration, it was very tempting to look for a single flaw. At first it was traffic, then when that didn\u2019t solve my problems, I thought it was subscribers, then positioning or email. Always looking for the solitary cause underlying my frustrations.<\/p>\n<p>The mistake here is that in a complex problem, there is very rarely a single obvious flaw contributing to a lack of success. Instead, it\u2019s usually a bunch of little flaws, which seem minor in isolation, but combine to make success harder.<\/p>\n<h2>Complex Problems, Multiple Flaws<\/h2>\n<p>For simple problems, looking for a single flaw is usually enough. These are the kinds of problems we\u2019re trained on in school.<\/p>\n<p>If you can\u2019t solve an algebra question, it usually means you\u2019re lacking one or two key understandings to get the solution. We\u2019ve been trained on problems like this, learning to isolate the key mistake to try to fix it.<\/p>\n<p>Complex problems don\u2019t usually work this way. Consider a different example, dating. Here you could make a list of all the factors that contribute to your success in finding a partner:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Meeting new people<\/li>\n<li>Conversation skills<\/li>\n<li>Fashion and appearance<\/li>\n<li>Being funny<\/li>\n<li>Extroversion<\/li>\n<li>Finding people with more common interests<\/li>\n<li>Confidence<\/li>\n<li>Situational experience<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>That\u2019s just for starters. Dating may not be complex in the hard-to-understand variety we reserve for physics equations, but it is complicated in the sheer number of different factors that contribute to your success.<\/p>\n<p>If you\u2019re having difficulty meeting someone, therefore, it\u2019s unlikely that there\u2019s a single flaw which underlies your lack of success. If there are 20 success factors, it\u2019s incredibly unlikely that 19 of them are perfect and the 20th is responsible for sabotaging your success.<\/p>\n<p>Yet most people don\u2019t reason this way. I\u2019ve heard tons of guys complain that \u201cbeing too nice\u201d is their problem. Besides being ridiculous, it\u2019s the exact single-flaw thinking that plagues most people facing complex problems.<\/p>\n<p>A more likely cause of failure is small flaws in several or more factors compounding. If there are 10 success factors in dating, which multiply together to give your results, then being just 10% better in each of them would result in 250% more success.<\/p>\n<p>The same was true with my business. The temptation was to look for a single cause, but the truth was there were dozens of minor flaws, each contributing to my overall lackluster results.<\/p>\n<h2>Big Results Through Little Improvements<\/h2>\n<p>Part of the cause of single-flaw thinking, is that people tend to view success linearly. If getting $100 per month takes effort, then getting $10,000 per month must require 100x the effort or skill.<\/p>\n<p>This can be especially frustrating if you\u2019re in the low end of those disproportionate results. You see how little results you\u2019re getting for such hard work, and it\u2019s hard to stay motivated knowing how much work is required ahead.<\/p>\n<p>But when success factors compound, little improvements spread over a larger area can result in big eventual wins. If the guys complaining about being \u201ctoo nice\u201d made a plan to improve one success factor each month for a year, they might never fix a \u201csingle flaw\u201d but still dramatically increase their results.<\/p>\n<p>When my business finally tipped towards providing a livable income, it wasn\u2019t the last change I made that did it. It was the accumulation of a bunch of steady improvements which magnified with time.<\/p>\n<h2>How to Solve Complex Problems<\/h2>\n<p>The alternative to single-flaw thinking is to optimize. That is, to list out dozens of areas which are compounding to success, and work on making many improvements to each of them. Rarely will a single fix be sufficient to cause a tipping point, but that doesn\u2019t matter if you aren\u2019t looking for the single flaw to solve.<\/p>\n<p>Optimizations aren\u2019t always little changes. It might take a lot of work to make even a small improvement in just one success factor. However, if you avoid single-flaw mentality, you won\u2019t get discouraged when a single fix doesn\u2019t immediately improve your results.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A mistake I\u2019ve made too often, is falling into \u201csingle flaw\u201d thinking. This is where you spend time trying to find the single cause for your lack of success in some complex problem. For example, in the first couple years of trying to start a business, I was struggling to make an income. In that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[9,13,681],"tags":[670,211,169,644,643],"class_list":{"0":"post-2226","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-courage","7":"category-happiness","8":"category-nc-mindset","9":"tag-business","10":"tag-growth","11":"tag-improvement","12":"tag-optimization","13":"tag-single-flaw","14":"entry"},"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>The &quot;Single Flaw&quot; Fallacy - Scott H Young<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/blog\/2011\/09\/12\/single-flaw\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The &quot;Single Flaw&quot; Fallacy - Scott H Young\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A mistake I\u2019ve made too often, is falling into \u201csingle flaw\u201d thinking. 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