The Power Of One
Never underestimate the power of one.
One idea is all that it takes to see completely new results.
But that’s only true if you APPLY it.
Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “One’s philosophy is not best expressed in words. It is expressed in the choices one makes. In the long run, we shape our lives and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our responsibility.”
One decision can send a wave of change over your business and your life.
Let me give you an example of the power of one…
Edward Lorenz was a mathematician and meteorologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and he really loved the study of weather. When computers had come along, he saw the opportunity to take his two passions: mathematics and meteorology, and use them to predict the weather.
At least that’s what he thought would happen.
He set out to put together a mathematical model of the weather – one where he would have a set of different equations that each stood for changes in temperature, pressure, wind velocity, etc.
When he was done, he had stripped the weather down to a basic model that had a set of 12 differential equations.
Pretty impressive, huh?
It seemed that way until he made the accidental discovery one day…
On a winter day in 1961, he wanted to re-examine a sequence of data coming from his model that he had created. But, instead of restarting from the beginning, he decided to save time and start the run from somewhere in the middle.
Using data printouts that he had from earlier complete sequences, he entered the conditions at a point near the middle of the previous run, and then re-started the model calculation.
That’s when something really strange and unexpected happened. The data from the second run should have matched up exactly with the data from the first run. But they didn’t.
At first they matched, but the runs eventually began to change dramatically.
The second one changed so much that it lost all resemblance to the first within a few “model” months that he put them through. He first thought something was wrong with his computer, cause the old school computers were slower and way less reliable than the ones we have nowadays.
But he checked the computer and there was nothing wrong. That’s when he discovered the source of the problem.
What had happened was this…
To save space, his printouts only showed three digits while the data in the computer’s memory contained six digits. That’s only one part in a thousandths difference.
He had entered the rounded-off data from the printouts assuming that the difference wouldn’t make a difference. (Just so you know, that wasn’t a dumb assumption, because even today temperature is not normally measured down to one part in a thousand.)
But what Edward Lorenz discovered was something amazing. It’s a discovery that’s called “The Butterfly Effect.”
He realized that small changes can have huge effects.
That means that a butterfly flapping its wings in South America can affect the weather in Central Park, New York!
This concept is true in other areas of life. When Michael Phelps, won in the Olympics in Beijing, he won one race literally by a “fingernail!”
That small difference made all the difference!
The purpose of BayBusinessHelp.com is to be the place where business owners in the San Francisco Bay Area (down to the Silicon Valley) find those ideas that can turn everything around.
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Photo by Stephen Torode
