The Dip
So for my last birthday, my friend got me a CD of The Dip. Pretty cool, read by the author. In short, this is about the following two fairly simple concepts.
- Becoming the best in the world.
- Dips and CulDeSacs
- Strategic quitting
Becoming the best in the world may sound a little self-helpish, at first but it comes with some interesting qualifiers. Being the best (x134) means knowing exactly what your niche is. It should be very specific. The ‘in the world‘ part is something you define as well. What ‘world’ are you trying to be ‘the best’ in?
Some examples:
“I want to be the most affordable chiropractor in Los Angeles.”
“I want to make the best custom-made gothic lolita outfits on the internet!”
“I want to offer moving services which allow as short notice as possible in the phone book.”
I guess in some ways it’s a mission statement of sorts. It’s worth mentioning that he brings up the long tail. This concept, in short, is that something like ‘first and second place make the most money by themselves, but places 3 through 10 equal a the same total amount of success.” This concept is best explained by things like amazon or itunes selling really obscure stuff for cheap vs. selling all the popular stuff for ‘expensive.’ The total cheap sales add up. So I bring this up because one might say, “But why be the best in the world? The long tail is proven to work? Why can’t I ‘focus’ on being places 3rd through 10th?” His answer of course is fine, if that is your focus, then make that your ‘best’. I.e. provide people with the widest selection of obscure whatevers ever.
As a side note, you can look at existing ‘bests in the world’ and frame them as such. I.e. World of Warcraft, while it might be ‘the best MMO ever,’ more specifically it can be ‘the most polished mmo with the most gradual learning curve, while still being easy to play if needed.’ or ‘the best and most balanced team-based player vs. player arena experience’ or whatever. He goes on to say if you’re trying to be the best in the world at something that someone already is the best in the world at, I.e. “The most delicious cola drink in the world,” or “best mint toothpaste in the world,’ you see that there’s already people with that title, so barring any crazy circumstances, don’t compete unless you change some paradigms. The awesome example he gave for this was how Microsoft basically has the monopoly on ‘the best word processing and spreadsheeting software in the world,’ but looking at things like Google Docs, they are pretty damn awesome, but changing then to say then google has made ‘the best, free, web-based word processing and spreadsheeting applications on the internet’.
Dips and Cul De Sacs are fairly simple to understand. A dip is a period of work when it stops being fun and starts being work. The part where you stop learning and start having to ’slog through it.’ It’s also, coincidentally, the period when you most want to quit things. Cul De Sacs are basically dips with no end. It’s basically a dead end, where you’re working on stuff with no considerable outcome. Advice is given on how to recognize if your issue is a dip or culdesac, if you can change your culdesac into a dip, and if your dip is worth powering through or quitting. It sounds really corny, I know, but that’s why he wrote the book and I didn’t.
The sections on strategic quitting were basically empowering advice explaining to you that quitting is ok, and how to recognize what needs quitting. The point of quitting something is help consolidate your resources so that you can use that energy to push through other ‘dips’ you’re stuck on. It’s contrary, he points out early, to what most self help-ish stuff advises, OMG NEVER QUIT! but in actuality it has some very good benefits. As he’s talking, my mind of course walked down the lists and lists of projects that I’ve not even started yet for this reason, which was reassuring. I’ve often complained about taking on too many side projects and never finishing any of them, so to use his words, I was in the dips of all of them and quit all of them. It was a cycle. It also has made me critical of any ‘open loops’ and dips I’m currently in and am taking the steps to decide to quit on a few of them. Quitting can also mean shelving, imo. One example being how I recently trashed hundreds of old archived blog posts I was trying to slog through. Having just erased them all made me have that much more time each day of not having to post links, and can now be spent on procrastinating on other things.
I highly recommend reading/listening to it, especially if you’re in any kind of rut. It’s a good perspective-shifter.