Specious Idea #1
95% commitment is easier than 100%.
Imagine you are attempting to lose weight and decide that cookies are at the heart of your problem. It would be significantly easier to completely erase your cookie consumption than reduce it by 95%. Even having the door slightly open with the occasional cookie will make sticking to the weight loss goal profoundly more difficult. This is because you will be constantly involved in self negotiations with old cookie eating habits.
“Neuroplasticity loves a non-negotiable contract. The brain is constantly doing analysis of duration, path and outcome. That’s a lot of work for the brain. The more that it can pass off the duration path and outcome to just reflex, the more energy it can allocate to other things. If you decide that completion of pushups, miles run, etc. is non-negotiable, then you actually have more energy for the pushups and running.
Once you set the number, all you have to do is just go, but people get caught in that tide pool, ‘well do I really have to do’ or ‘what if I get injured.’ And that is work. It’s clear that by making the decision, there’s more resources to devote to the execution.” - Dr. Andrew Huberman, Stanford Neuroscientist
Importantly, this insight has valuable generalizability. Paul Graham, the Godfather of Silicon Valley, identified this idea in his widely read Do Things that Don’t Scale.
“We usually advise startups to pick a growth rate they think they can hit, and then just try to hit it every week. The key word here is "just." If they decide to grow at 7% a week and they hit that number, they're successful for that week. There's nothing more they need to do. But if they don't hit it, they've failed in the only thing that mattered, and should be correspondingly alarmed.
Programmers will recognize what we're doing here. We're turning starting a startup into an optimization problem. And anyone who has tried optimizing code knows how wonderfully effective that sort of narrow focus can be. Optimizing code means taking an existing program and changing it to use less of something, usually time or memory. You don't have to think about what the program should do, just make it faster. For most programmers this is very satisfying work. The narrow focus makes it a sort of puzzle, and you're generally surprised how fast you can solve it.
Focusing on hitting a growth rate reduces the otherwise bewilderingly multifarious problem of starting a startup to a single problem. You can use that target growth rate to make all your decisions for you; anything that gets you the growth you need is ipso facto right. Should you spend two days at a conference? Should you hire another programmer? Should you focus more on marketing? Should you spend time courting some big customer? Should you add x feature? Whatever gets you your target growth rate?” -Paul Graham, Y Combinator Cofounder
Simplifying a goal into its essence eliminates costly cognitive resources that could go to the achievement of that goal. Therefore, 100% is easier 95%.