Guy Reams (00:00.686)
All right, today is day 193, law of conditional progression. This is a concept that I've been working on for quite some time. And I keep finding anecdotal evidence that this is absolutely true. I think it's almost a law of physics. And in fact, it is a law of physics. Because let's just think of it this way.
Imagine you're in a spaceship and you're floating in space. You're at a dead still, just drifting in space. And your spaceship is circular. And you've got a whole bunch of crew members, each with a canister, which would provide some degree of thrust if they fired it off and the spaceship would go in a certain direction. Well,
If you wanted to get back to earth or back to your base or whatever it was, you would want everybody to provide their thrust in one direction to cause the spaceship to go in the direction that you want. So you would have them push their thrust in the opposite side of the ship in which you wanted your ship to go. That would make a lot of sense. You would not want everybody to be providing the thrust in different directions, because what would happen is you would just start spinning.
you would really go nowhere. So in order to have forward progress towards your destination, the thrust needs to be going all in the same direction. So that just makes total and obvious sense to us, right?
So there's a theory or a belief that all progress is good progress. And generally, progress is good. Consistent forward progress is always desirable. Taking one step after another, right? Just make sure that every day you make no progress. I mean, having zero progress is really bad because everybody gets depressed and listless and doesn't enjoy their time. So you definitely want progress. But there is a condition to progress. And that condition is,
Guy Reams (02:12.653)
that it must be focused progress. And getting back to my spaceship analogy, it's for that reason. If your progress is not focused, if you're not working at least in the generally same direction, then you will actually, it'll be as if you had no progress whatsoever. Or in some cases, you may be actually going backwards. So this is a concept that seems painfully obvious, but I've met with and worked with
I've been employed by companies, I've owned my own companies, I've consulted for companies, and I've seen this exact same problem happen all the time. I've been guilty of it, and I've seen others be guilty of it. You want to make progress, so your inclination is to try a bunch of things. And so you're providing a whole bunch of energy and effort in a whole bunch of different directions, hoping to make some progress.
and you're thinking in your mind that, well, when one of these starts to show progress, then I will commit all my resources to that. But the reality is you never show progress because you're basically spinning in different directions because you're not focused in your progression. So for anybody who is looking at a business or an organization,
from a different perspective. Like let's say we're all looking at this spaceship floating in the middle of the space. We would clearly see when the spaceship was making progress because it would be, you could see it was making a linear progression towards its destination. Same thing with a company. Most people can step, who are not part of the company, can look at the organization and think, well, they're not going anywhere. What are they doing? But the people that are in the business really struggle with this because,
I think it's a matter of faith. It's not understanding that focused direction is always better than unfocused direction.
Guy Reams (04:18.061)
You know, we all know, we've all played video games, like you play a video game, and we've all gotten programmed in video games to know that in order to go to the next level, you have to meet certain qualifications. You have to meet conditions. These are conditions to our progress. So as a business or an organization gets bigger, this is also a condition for progress.
There must be a focus in a single direction. Even if the direction is slightly off or slightly wrong, it'll be infinitely better than a bunch of efforts in a bunch of scattered direction. So this is a painful, obvious observation for anybody outside of the organization, but very difficult for the people in the organization to realize what's going on.
So all progress is good progress as long as it is focused in one direction. This is what I call the law of conditional progress. You cannot achieve your objective unless you are singularly focused in one direction. If you get distracted by a myriad of ideas, then you will not make progress. You will spin or waste your energy, drift off course.
So you must stay focused in a consistent direction so that all your daily, weekly, monthly efforts, all of the efforts of your team will all be focused on one path. So this is the condition in which progress actually has an impact. Thank you.