1: A large passenger jet left New Zealand for a sightseeing flight to Antarctica. 257 people were on board. The year was 1979.
“Unknown to the pilots, however, someone had modified the flight coordinates by a mere two degrees,” recounts famed German pilot Dieter Utchdorf in Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy write in 10x Is Easier Than 2x.
“This error placed the aircraft 28 miles to the east of where the pilots assumed they were,” Dieter notes.
As the jet got closer to Antarctica, the pilots flew the plane lower so the passengers could see the landscape. “Although both were experienced pilots,” he observes, “neither had made this particular flight before, and they had no way of knowing that the incorrect coordinates had placed them directly in the path of Mount Erebus, an active volcano that rises from the frozen landscape to a height of more than 12,000 feet.”
The white of the clouds blended with the white snow and ice covering the volcano.
“By the time the instruments sounded the warning that the ground was rising fast toward them, it was too late,” Dieter states. “The airplane crashed into the side of the volcano, killing everyone on board.”
2: Dan and Ben draw a parallel between this tragedy and what they call “fitness function.”
“In computer and evolutionary sciences, fitness function means clarifying the qualities and measurement of a specific objective,” the authors explain. “Put simply, fitness function clarifies what you’re optimizing for—our chosen standards—and the ‘fitness’ or developmental path required to live those standards. . . It helps us get highly specific about what we want, as well as the specific growth and value we’ll experience.”
In this way, fitness function acts like the direction and destination that an airplane will travel.
“A slight tweak in direction—even a few degrees different—over a long enough period of time leads to massive differences,” they observe. “Even being one degree off for a long enough period of time will lead hundreds or thousands of miles away from your desired destination.”
Fitness function defines where we are going and what we are becoming.
“The details matter here,” Dan and Ben surmise. Our “fitness function will be unique to us, because what we most want and the specific standards by which we define success are also unique to us. . . No one else has the exact same goals or standards we do. Therefore, measuring ourselves against someone else’s results and standards is a sure path to becoming average or good, but never uniquely great, one-of-a-kind, and world-class.”
3: When we define our fitness function, we know where to channel our energy. As in the 80-20 rule, where 80% of our results come from 20% of our actions, it becomes crystal clear where we must focus our 20 percent to drive maximum success.
Once we know the specific 10x transformation we seek, that 10x becomes our filter to experience the world.
“Over time as we get more committed to it, we not only become more optimized and specialized for that particular thing, but we also begin filtering everything else out,” Dan and Ben observe. Our “fitness function is our filter. It filters not only what’s important and what’s not important. It also filters what we see and what we don’t see—our selective attention.”
Economists call this opportunity cost. Biologists call it atrophy. We “will atrophy and become increasingly unaware in the areas outside our filter. By getting committed to something specific—a chosen fitness function—we become an increasingly specific and unique type of person. We stop seeing, noticing, and paying attention to anything that isn’t relevant to our perceptual filter.
“Whatever we focus on expands. Whatever we focus on, we create more of. Whatever we focus on, we become.”
In time, we approach mastery within our fitness function.
“The person who understands the game will see far more nuance and meaning—finer distinctions—within every facet of the game than the casual watcher,” Dan and Ben write.
“They’ll recognize important subtleties that the casual observer won’t notice,” they note. “The person with greater understanding sees and understands the situation more systemically, recognizing that even small tweaks to even small individual parts can create massive and non-linear changes to the overall whole.”
More tomorrow.
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Reflection: How can I apply the concept of “fitness function” to my daily actions to ensure I’m consistently moving toward my goals?
Action: I will identify one small daily action that aligns with my fitness function and commit to implementing it consistently, tracking my progress to stay on course.
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