There is a very basic rule of the universe that most people seem to forget. If you remember it, your life will be much better – largely because you’ll avoid wasting a lot of effort. Here’s the rule: The easier something is, the more people will do it.
Why is that rule important? Because people often lament that something is too hard, onerous, or bothersome – and then also complain that too many people are doing it. But one of those things is balanced against the other!
The example that shows up for me most frequently is career-related: people want job applications to be easier. And sure, some of the requirements these days are ridiculous. People don’t want to fill out eight forms, record five videos, design an app, interview sixteen times, and take a blood test just to try to get a job. They want to push one button called “Apply” and be done with it!
But if you pay attention, you discover that the other side of the problem is that ten thousand people apply to every job in the first five minutes that it’s posted. And look, I know you don’t want to hear this, but… you cannot solve both of those problems at once.
Anything that makes it easier to apply to jobs will increase the number of people who do so. And the only way to decrease that number is to make the application process more involved. Those are two sides of one scale.
This has nothing to do with whether the process is even good. Forget about whether whatever hoops companies are creating actually find good candidates or filter out bad ones. We aren’t even at that problem yet. We’re just talking about the math. And the math at this stage is – unfortunately – simple.
The economics language around this is “there are no twenty-dollar bills on the sidewalk.” Think like this: if a twenty-dollar bill was on top of Mount Everest, it would stay there for a long time, because very few people could get it and it wouldn’t be worth it for anyone to try. On the other side of the spectrum, a twenty-dollar bill just laying on the sidewalk would be picked up instantly – by someone else. The easier the bill is to reach, the more people are reaching for it.
If you want getting the bill to be easy, someone else got it. If you want no one else to be competing with you for the bill, then it has to be so hard to get that it’s not worth it – even for you.
Now, I’m not a doom-and-gloom guy. I offer solutions and opportunities.
The world is complex, and in that complexity there are opportunities for improvements – maybe not to an entire system, but definitely to your own life. Don’t lament that the mountain is too hard to climb or the sidewalk is too crowded – find a third way. There may be two ten-dollar bills just down the street, you just have to play a different game.
In practical terms, remember: There is almost always someone on the other side of the problem. To go back to the job example, this is also a problem for companies. It’s a different problem, but it’s a problem. Believe it or not, companies aren’t making this hard as a punishment for you specifically. When they make their application processes difficult and weird, they’re doing it because they’re trying (and I grant you, often trying very ham-fistedly) to reduce the number of candidates to a manageable level while still retaining the best ones. Most of them fail miserably (that’s a whole other post on why), but they’re definitely looking for solutions. That’s your angle.
Don’t play rigged games. If a process is crazy difficult and five hundred people are still engaging in it, then that means the process simply can’t sustain the weight of the math. So skip the process. Email the CEO directly. Do something weird and a little difficult, but that you want to do. Cut the line, in other words. It might not work! But the main process definitely won’t.
But understand this problem when you see it. This math dilemma is a brick wall, but it’s not universal. Go around it whenever you can.
The Opportunity Machine 