Relentless Iteration to Mastery

I used to wonder how people did great things and became great. What is greatness?

Greatness is the relentless pursuit of improvement and progress to your vision, even in the face of failure, pitfalls and seemingly insurmountable obstacles. To achieve your Magnus Opus, your great work, you must embrace experimentation and its many iterations by learning, pivoting, and refining your mind and your actions towards your Magnum Opus.

Relentless Iteration Cycles

1. Set Clear Goals Just Outside Your Comfort Zone

Going through life without a clear goal or target is like driving without a destination. Give your mind a clear goal to accomplish, and it will work day and night, even while you sleep, to figure out a path to that goal. An achievable goal that you know how to do is rote. 

Map out the 5 or 10 steps to your Magnum Opus and make them just out of reach. This will force you to think bigger, and for that, you need to step just outside your comfort zone. Then, break down your first step into 3-5 smaller steps and make those steps happen.

Do you feel a little stressed? Perfect! Don't know how to accomplish your goal exactly? Perfect!

2. Embrace Failure as Learning Feedback

Every failure is just a lesson in disguise. It provides hints on what not to do and how to figure out a better path to take. It provides deeper insights into first principles, the insights into your own human nature and those around you. It allows you to push your boundaries beyond the limits of what you think is possible into the impossible.

This is how you make the impossible possible.

As I started raising money for our big AI idea on How.com, our first friend said he would pass. It felt like a heartbreak at first. But then it became our resolve to make our vision bigger and grander. It also became the fuel that lit our hearts on fire. Sixty of our friends and family have since invested, and we've raised over $8m USD with more to come. We are printing and putting this rejection on our wall as our reminder that rejection is a gift.

3. Continuous Iterations to Improve

Your goal in continual iterations is to improve and figure out the best path to reach your Magnum Opus. This is the compound effect in motion each moment, each day. 1% better daily is 38 times better in a year. In two years an astounding 1500x. Simple in principle, but takes intention, action and providence relentlessly.

4. Persist through setbacks

Life is just fractals of setbacks and forward momentum. Each setback positions you to slingshot forward as you solve or gain insights from each setback. As you solve each setback, the compounding solutions and insights become your foundation to spring forward.

For six years we tried to get approval to get the dot.co wildcard deal with the country of Columbia, gaining approval by 90% but unable to get the last 10%. We then pivoted to working with Cameroon to get the dot.cm wildcard deal. It was done in 3 months as we had figured out most of the deal points from Columbia. This was to get the data for all domains in the dot.com, which was to assist us in predicting the traffic from any given domain, allowing us to predict the revenue for any domain name. This put me on the cover of one of my favourite business magazines and on the front page of almost every major newspaper in the world. It was just an idea as one way to overcome many setbacks.

5. Embrace Insights and Wins

Instead of celebrating the final big victory, revel even in the small insights, the small wins. They may be the hope of something better, the realization of an insight or experiment. These become your stepping stones so that when you look back, you can see these moments that set your foundation as you step to the next level of your Magnum Opus.

We just received our first wire transfers. $30,000 USD and $100,000 USD. Before this, we received our first signed investment agreements.  We just got our latest of 60 investors signed at $10,000 USD, but even though the amount is smaller, we value our relationship with him, who comes from the VC world, family office world, and a great product guy.

Your Mindset to Relentlessly Iterate

There are many mindsets to iterate relentlessly, but what stops us are four key mindsets. The hardest of these is patience and resilience. I think of the tortoise as my role model in these two as well as ants, as I watch them relentlessly plod along in endeavour for the colonies.

The other two are humility and open-mindedness. Humility allows you to connect and help others, who in turn wish to help you, according to the law of reciprocity. Being open-minded allows you to connect more deeply, understand things and people, and ask curious questions that can unlock insight into their hearts and into the fabric of life.

1. Patience

2. Resilience

3. Humility

4. Be Open-minded

Be Relentless

Just two big reminders:

1. Those closest to you will either support you dearly or, out of concern and sometimes envy, be resistant to you going for your Magnum Opus.

2. Be contrarian and make it right for you. You don't have to be right with the world. You have to make it right for you.

See your Magnum Opus, believe in your Magnum Opus, live your Magnum Opus and be your Magnum Opus.

Read on for my big life question (only one-minute more). It helped me in my life and I hope it helps you in yours.