The Six Most Important Lessons I Learned At MIT: #5/6

Hi,

I'm Brent Michael Phillips and welcome back to our series on the most important things I learned while I was at MIT.

So our lesson for today is this,

That successful complex systems are grown,

Not built.

And you may hear that and go,

Okay,

Brent,

What are you talking about?

Everything in your life that's important to you is a complex system.

Your marriage,

Your family,

Your career,

Your finances,

All of these are complex systems.

In fact,

Your physical health,

Your emotional health,

Also complex systems.

If you want to be healthy,

If you want to feel great,

If you want to experience love,

If you want to make more money,

If you want to develop your intuition,

If you want to achieve higher consciousness,

I would encourage you to learn a little bit of how to create a successful complex system.

Everything in your life that you care about is a complex system and learning to work with them and build them,

Create them,

Grow them in ways that successful is going to be enormously important.

So if you don't already have as much business as you want,

Or as much money,

Or as much intuition,

You might want to pay attention.

I'm going to lay out some great secrets here.

So now let's dive into what I'm saying.

Let me give you an example,

Beautiful example.

This really happened to me when I was an undergrad at MIT.

So if you go into MIT and you're insane enough to pick a computer science major,

One of the classes you must take,

At least when I was there,

Was called 6.

170,

Computer Software Systems.

And basically it's a laboratory class where you're divided up into groups of three and each team of three has to build out a complex system of software specified by the teacher.

And so one of the teams went about it totally wrong.

They tried to build their system and it failed.

Here's what they did.

They had the three people,

They assigned one person to writing the code,

A second person to debugging the code,

And a third person to test it.

Disaster,

Right?

And if you're wondering,

Hey,

That sounds reasonable,

Let me tell you what happened.

That we had,

What,

Something like 10 weeks to do the project.

So the person that wrote the code spent a couple weeks writing the code,

But didn't really test it.

Just wrote a ton of code that should work.

They then handed it to the person who was supposed to test it and they spent time testing it and found millions of problems.

They then handed it to the person who was supposed to debug it,

Who was so overwhelmed by work,

They all failed the class.

Why?

They tried to build the system.

They tried to decide in advance,

Okay,

We'll write this code and this code and this code,

And they went and wrote a ton of code,

Thousands of lines,

Without ever bothering to test any small piece of it.

And it was a disaster.

They failed.

Why?

They tried to build the project.

Instead,

Those that were successful,

Including my group,

I thought it was pretty good.

Most groups succeeded.

We grew our software.

What does that mean?

It means we started with a specification of all these different things it had to do.

And we'd pick one little piece of it and we would build code to address that one little piece.

And then we would test it and debug it.

And instead of dividing the work into one person codes,

One person tests,

One person debugs,

Each of us took ownership of certain aspects of the application.

I did features A,

B,

And C.

My partner did features X,

Y,

And Z.

And another partner did features R,

S,

And T.

So we built a small piece,

Tested it,

Debugged it until it worked,

Then added the next small piece,

Tested it,

Built it till it worked,

And then retested the whole system.

That is what I mean by growing software.

And of course,

This is not limited to software,

Right?

I would guess that less than 5% of you care at all about building software.

I hear you.

This is about everything in your life.

So let's talk another example of how people trying to build something fail,

But those that grow it have incredible success.

Let's talk about building a business,

Specifically being an entrepreneur.

And I'm an entrepreneur.

I've always been one to found companies.

I founded six different companies during my career,

Mostly software.

The one that stuck is the healing company,

But mostly software companies.

Whether you're in software,

Energy healing,

Coaching,

Selling widgets,

Trying to dethrone Amazon,

It doesn't matter.

Most entrepreneurs work like this.

You have an idea for a product or a service,

Something you're pretty excited about,

Something you're passionate about.

So you go and spend an enormous amount of energy and effort and money building this thing.

Maybe it's a book,

Maybe it's an audio coaching service,

Doesn't matter.

You spend a ton of time and energy bringing your vision to life.

Then you go out and try to figure out how to sell it.

You just buy up advertisements and hope people buy.

That is a formula for failure.

I'm not saying you can't succeed that way.

I'm just saying your chances are pretty low.

And I realized this because this is the exact problem I've had.

I tried to build them instead of growing them.

Kind of ironic because I knew this in terms of software,

Right?

This happened with all my software companies.

I tried to build them out and they failed for the most part.

Why?

You cannot build a complex system and expect it to work.

It has to be grown.

So in terms of your business,

Marketing,

This is how you grow it.

If you remember back in the days when we had magazines and mail order catalogs,

In the back of the magazine,

They'd always have all these advertisements,

Right?

Maybe you liked car magazines and they'd have ads in the back for different performance enhancements or fuel additives or seat covers or whatever it was.

And they'd have a little description of it,

Maybe a picture,

And there'd be a phone number.

Buy our new seat cover.

It'll help you with your back pain.

It's,

You know,

$49.

95.

And at the bottom,

It would say,

Please allow six to eight weeks for delivery.

Did that ever puzzle you?

It puzzled me because here's the thing.

It clearly does not take six or eight weeks to take a box off a shelf,

Put an address label on it and ship it out,

Right?

We're talking three days,

Maybe four or five if mail is slow.

Why six to eight weeks?

Here's why.

Those that were successful with mail order businesses learned that the wrong way to do it was to go spend a bunch of time and money and energy building something and then advertise it and hoped people would buy it.

That's building your market.

That doesn't work very well.

You might get lucky,

Right?

I'm not saying it can never work.

I'm just saying the chances of success are relatively low.

Instead,

This is what they did.

They would come up with advertisements for products that did not exist yet,

At least not in their finished form.

And certainly they didn't have a bunch of inventory sitting on a shelf in a warehouse.

So they would put an advertisement for a seat cushion or oil additive or a computer gadget or whatever it was that have an idea for a product.

And they create an advertisement for it and spend a little bit of money running the ad to see how many people would buy it.

And if they got enough people to buy it,

Then they would actually go and build out the product and create it and put it in a box and ship it to you.

That's why it took six to eight weeks.

Because most of the time the products either didn't exist or at the minimum,

They had not yet been manufactured.

That is a much more effective way to build a marketing plan.

Why?

You're growing it.

You're not building it.

The mistake we make with business,

So many of us,

Including me,

Is you can see how we try to build it out.

All this time and energy creating the service,

The product,

The class,

The book,

The music,

Whatever.

And then we put it out there and try to figure out how to sell it.

Disaster.

Grow it.

Create the advertisement first.

Run it a few times.

See what the responses.

See if you're getting enough positive responses to justify creating this thing and manufacturing it and shipping it and supporting it.

If you do,

Great.

You're off and running.

If you don't,

Well then,

Aren't you glad you didn't spend a ton of time and money creating this thing that no one wants to buy?

Of course.

And it's really funny how this lesson shows up in so many areas in life.

One of my other buddies from MIT,

His name is Chris,

He went on a trip to India.

He said it was the craziest thing,

That he was going on a bus from one city to another.

And the bus was pulled over by highway robbers.

And they made everyone get off the bus at gunpoint and take all of their valuables and put them into a pile.

Then the robbers inspected the valuables for a while,

Made a bunch of phone calls.

And after about an hour,

One of the highway robbers came up to the bus driver,

Talked to him for a minute.

And the bus driver told everyone,

Take your things and get back on the bus.

And so everyone took all their valuables back and got on the bus and they drove away.

And my buddy Chris asked the bus driver,

What the heck was that,

Right?

These people pulled us over,

Held a gun to our head,

Took our valuables,

And then an hour later handed them back?

That makes no sense.

Here's what the bus driver said.

He said,

Oh,

This happens all the time.

You see,

The police are corrupt here and everyone knows exactly how much it costs to bribe the police to rob a bus.

And when they took all the valuables,

They did a quick appraisal and they decided that what they would get from robbing this bus was not enough to justify the bribes to the police they would need to make.

So they let everyone take their things and they got back on the bus.

That,

And I'm not glorifying highway robbery,

That's a great successful system.

It's grown,

Not built.

That's how we achieve success.

And so I want to call out some other examples in life so you can see this really clearly.

Music is like this to some degree.

You cannot synthesize great music in a corporate boardroom.

We know that the big music labels have tried.

You cannot get people that have a specific look or a certain note or melody and synthesize that into great music.

It doesn't work that way.

They're trying to build it.

And in my opinion,

This is why the quality of pop music is atrocious nowadays.

Pop music was great in the 60s,

70s,

80s.

I mean,

Not all of it,

Of course,

But there was a lot of great pop music you would hear on the radio.

Why?

Back then,

The music executives didn't think they knew everything about the industry.

So some new young band would come in with a demo and they go,

Hey,

You know what,

I think the kids might like this.

And they put it out there.

They didn't try to figure out step by step how to build it from scratch because great music has to be grown.

It can't be built.

If we look in the world of sports,

We'll see the same thing.

Most sports have some kind of all-star team,

Right?

Let's say,

For example,

Professional basketball.

In the NBA,

They have an all-star break in the middle of the season.

The fans and the players and the coaches and the sports writers all vote on who the best players are to go on the all-star team.

And that's the all-star game.

Here's the crazy thing.

The team that wins the championship almost always is better than the all-star team,

Even though the all-star team has the best individual players.

Why?

The all-star team has been built.

You artificially take a bunch of players from all the teams who have the best numbers and you throw them together.

And a lot of the time it doesn't work.

Why?

The team has been built.

It's artificial.

Whereas the team that wins the championship,

That's something that's been grown.

That team has been together,

At least some of the players,

For years.

They know each other.

They know the coach.

They know the systems.

They know how to play together.

So even though the teams that win the championship may not have the best individual players,

They are the most effective teams.

Why?

A team is a complex system.

It is best grown,

Not built.

Great example of this would be the 2002 Los Angeles Angels.

They won the World Series and beat the New York Yankees in the playoffs,

Even though the Yankees had three times the payroll that the Angels did.

And the manager of the team,

Mike Socia,

Was asked in an interview,

Hey Mike,

How is it that a team that was almost last place in terms of salary,

That didn't really have many individual superstars,

How in the world did you beat the Yankees and win the World Series?

Here's what he said.

He said,

To win the World Series,

You don't have to have the best players.

You just have to have the right players.

Why?

If you have the right players,

You can grow a team.

If you just randomly assemble the best players,

They often don't click.

An all-star team,

Again,

Is built,

Not grown.

And I'm going to call out a couple more examples because I really want you to take this lesson to heart.

If you can see this and make an adjustment in how you run your business,

Your family,

Your healing,

Whatever,

It can make a gigantic difference for you.

Because again,

We want to grow,

Not build.

Another example in the world of self-improvement,

Or really any public facing industry,

There's a saying that goes like this,

It takes years and years of hard work to become an overnight sensation.

It takes years and years of hard work to become an overnight sensation.

You have to build up your skill,

Know what you're doing.

And you may toil in anonymity,

Getting paid very little for years or decades.

And then boom,

All of a sudden,

You get a break,

You're in the spotlight and you become a huge hit.

I remember years ago,

There was the lady from Scotland who was 60 some years old,

And she had the most beautiful singing voice.

Out of nowhere,

She ended up on one of their talent shows and the world got introduced to this lady with this absolutely amazing voice.

And she had been working on her singing for years,

For decades.

And then all of a sudden,

The recognition came.

She didn't try to build a career as a singer.

She simply grew her talent,

Grew her voice.

And then when the timing was right,

She got the exposure.

And so the reason that this is so difficult for us,

The spiritual reason,

Which I want to share with you right now is really critical.

We all tend to fall into the trap of what's called ego mimicry.

In other words,

We do something and get a positive result.

So then we try to do something 10 times bigger,

Expecting 10 times the result.

This is the thinking that leads us astray,

That causes us to fail,

To go bankrupt,

To get divorced,

To get sick.

And I'm not blaming anyone.

I've experienced all these things for myself,

Right?

But what will happen is you build a little bit and you have some success and all of a sudden you think you're God's gift or whatever,

Right?

And you build out this really big complex thing and then it fails.

A good example of this was,

I remember when I first got into cryptocurrency back in 2017.

I had put a little bit of money into the market in October and I thought,

Well,

You know,

I need to learn more about this.

I'll wait to the end of the year,

Around the holidays,

I'll have more time and then I'll get more into it.

And long story short,

I put a little bit of money into crypto and from October to January,

It tripled.

And I'm like,

Oh my gosh,

This is the best thing ever,

Right?

And so then I put in a lot more money,

10 times as much.

In retrospect,

I bought right at the top of the market and it crashed and I lost an enormous amount of money.

Why?

That's egomimicry.

I built the system rather than trying to grow it.

What I should have done was put in a little more money and seen what happened,

Right?

And put it a little more and made constant adjustments.

That's the key to success.

The enemy of success is thinking you can figure out all ahead of time.

That you can go and build a product or service,

A relationship,

Just based on your great ideas.

No,

Everything you really care about in your life is a complex system.

Your spouse,

Your children,

Your health,

Your finances,

Your career,

Your business,

Your mood,

Everything is a complex system.

And if you want to have success,

You need to learn how to break it down step by step and grow it.

Get constant feedback,

Constant adjustment.

That way you're far more likely to hit the mark.

I hope you found this to be some combination of informative,

Entertaining,

And transformational.

And I'll see you very soon to conclude our series on the most important things I learned while I was at MIT.

Until then,

Namaste and goodbye.