start small – From the desk of Adam Thomas

If you don’t pay attention, it chips away focus, and bad habits stick around

I used to have an old car.

Driving it cost me more mental overhead than a newer car, all because of a simple problem.

The issue: my car’s alignment.

That meant forward motion drifted the car to the right, and I had to account for it. That added mental overhead when I drove.

When I drove it, I had to keep both hands on the wheel and constantly check the road ahead of me. I couldn’t use cruise control.

It didn’t need much action for each mile, but on longer trips, it started to take its toll with extra fatigue.

With no cruise control and having to pay attention consistently, I got nervous more often.

The driving worsened due to my anxiety.

To bring it under control, I picked up bad habits by over-correcting.

Now, even when driving a brand new rental car, those bad habits hang around.

The lesson: Pay attention to smaller problems, and solve them as soon as possible. A little issue that doesn’t seem huge can significantly affect its system.

It’s often cheaper than you think

Once you decided on that idea after two minutes and figured out what’s next, the next thing to do is to experiment. I can think of no better place to do that than the internet.

Whatever you want to try, there is a platform to test the idea out and “kick the tires.” Most of them don’t need much “social credit” (meaning you can do stuff anonymously). You can run as many experiments as you can handle, and learn while doing instead of pondering or thinking.

Once you think about something and put some words around it, you can get the “task” done, usually at cost.* There are a ton of services out there that are a Google search away from solving whatever hurdle you face.

At cost pricing means, experimentation is cheap, often free.

Some places you can use to carry out experiments:

Try one today.

*Internet companies aren’t good at pricing, so the SKU’s skew to the cheap side.