0512 – Life is a long board problem

Original link: https://atjason.com/daily/2023-05-12.html

This article is an excerpt.

You may have heard of the “bucket principle”: the capacity of the bucket is determined by the shortest piece of wood.

What it means is that the key to some systems is not to develop the strongest point, but to avoid the weakest point. 99% of the places are fine, as long as there is a problem in 1% of the places, the whole system will fail.

Human health is like this. If there is a serious problem with one organ, even if other organs are completely normal, life and even life will be affected.

Such problems determined by short boards are collectively referred to as “short board problems”. There are many such examples in daily life, in addition to human health, there is also food safety, as long as one ingredient is not clean, you may get food poisoning.

The same is true for consumer products such as automobiles, televisions, and mobile phones. As long as one component fails, the product has quality problems.

However, this is not today’s topic. I recently read an article and realized that in addition to the short board problem, there is also the long board problem.

The “longboard problem” means that the key to the problem is not the weakest point, but the strongest point. As long as one point is particularly outstanding, the matter will be successful, and it doesn’t matter whether the other points are good or bad.

This is the case with literary and artistic works. You buy an album and don’t like to listen to other songs, but if there is one song you really like, the album is worth it. Movies and novels are successful as long as there is one character or plot that is particularly touching.

The same is true for venture capital. As long as you invest in a particularly successful project, you can make up for all your losses.

Most importantly, life is a “longboard problem”. In life, failures and setbacks are not important, and it doesn’t matter how many times, as long as there is one big success, life will be successful.

The biggest success determines the achievement and height of your life. Many Nobel Prize winners have made an important scientific discovery in their lifetime, which is enough to become a great scientist.

It doesn’t matter how much code a programmer has written, as long as he has created a major influential software, his career will be successful.

We must learn to distinguish between “short board problems” and “long board problems”, and their solutions are completely different. To solve the short board problem, we need to focus on the weak link and make up the shortest board; to solve the long board problem, we only need to promote the strongest link, and don’t care about other things.

There is no need to care about those unimportant things in life, and there is no need to be frustrated by setbacks and rejections, it will pass. What you have to do is to look forward, to strive for a big success, make it big enough and bigger, just once is enough.

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