The 5% Solution

Throughout the last two years of weight lifting I have noticed a unique phenomenon.

What I have noticed is how much of a difference working out with another individual has on muscle growth.

But wait a minute.. isn't that obvious? Doesn't EVERYONE know that working out with an accountability partner helps?

The answer is that Yes, most sane educated people understand this. HOWEVER, there is something that most people do not know. In fact, even most weight lifters don't understand a very important distinction (that I'll get to later).

Outside of making it easier to GET to the gym, working out with someone else doesn't have that much of an observable difference. In fact, to the outsider, the difference is so subtle that it is not noticable.

The difference is there however. What is the difference, is it 5, 10, 15% more effort? I would venture to say that conservatively it is somewhere around 5%.

But here's the phenomenon: the 5% extra immersion that weight lifters exhibit when they are held accountable by their partners makes ALL THE DIFFERENCE.

It is hard to quantify but simple pictures of the muscle (not of the effort) would reveal just how dramatic of a difference that extra 5% makes.

Now, here's the question that I invariably relate back to: is this knowledge transferrable to business.

After all, while weight lifting can conform to a 5%-increased-effort-significant-return, certainly there is no way that this phenomenon exists in business?

Well, my friend, it doesn't exist in all of buisness, it only exists in the startup phases of entrepreneurship.

Why? Because often times, it is the 5% push that makes all the difference between success and failure. This is not "inspirational talk" but rather based on the logic that wealth creation is the result of capturing an opportunity that everyone else stopped short of (after all, it was easy to capture the opportunity the marketplace would be overflooded as it is in certain low barrier to entry markets).

Having a partner is also an unobservable difference in business. It gives you that extra motivation when things are going bad. It gives you an extra reason for accomplishing your goal and perservering, it gives you that feeling of "It's us against the world" that just gives you that extra push that means EVERYTHING. (of course, if you operated under the metaprogram in which you are motivated by this).