At RezScore we’re big fans of creating basic “hacks” to nudge yourself in the direction of success. By “hacks” we don’t mean computer hacking, although we spend plenty of time with our noses in terminals. Nor do we mean “hacks” in the sense of amateurs, although we are certainly amateurish!
By “hacks”, we’re referring to creating and reinforcing habits and systems that can help you succeed. Such hacks are commonly used in all aspects of your life, methods to help you eat better, exercise more, et al. Life hacks are always fun to learn, and are applied to nearly everything:
At RezScore, our particular focus is on job hacks, any sort of hack that helps you improve your career. We’re launching our semi-regular “SuccessCast” series of livestreams to showcase our favorite hacks you can implement to improve your job search and career prospects. We’d love to hear about various ways you’ve hacked yourself to become more successful in your career!
For our very first SuccessCast, we introduced our CDE framework for evaluating a successful hack. The hack pictured in the image above is great for gutting strawberries, but unlikely to create major benefits in non-strawberry fields. Therefore, we are concentrating on great hacks that can check off multiple boxes from our new framework for a successful hack.
CDE Framework for a Successful Hack
We observe that successful growth hacks contain the following elements:
- Compounding Benefits: What Nassim Nicholas Taleb refers to as “convex properties”, a hack is most powerful when it accrues benefits over time. That is, the longer it is in place, the more value it creates — like saving money starting from an early age.
- Diffuse Potential Benefits: When a growth hack is likely to produce a diverse array of benefits, it is more powerful when it only has one possible outcome. If your get-rich-quick hack doesn’t get you a million dollars overnight, but you learn about yourself and a make a lot of friends, then at least it’s not a total loss.
- Easy to Follow: A system that has too much friction, like a complex diet, is less likely to stick in your life. A good hack will add no difficulty to your life. A great hack will actually make your life easier. Finding beneficial hacks that remove friction from your life are almost certain to stick.
For example, the strawberry de-stemming showed earlier is relatively Easy to Follow, but not super useful on the other dimensions. It has relatively few Compounding Benefits, unless traditional strawberry de-stemming had particularly adverse effects, like inspiring you to eat a bucket of M&M’s instead. Nor does strawberry de-stemming have a ton of Diffuse Properties — the only reward you get at the end other than a delicious berry.
In contrast, the hack we describe in the video is just a relatively simple shift on a problem that could fulfill all three of these properties. We were failing to produce the pre-recorded video content so highly demanded because we got hung up in the editing process. Our simple hack was just to start live-streaming our content instead. That’s it.
It turns out, this is a great hack because it fulfills all parts of the CDE Framework. Moving from pre-recorded video to livestreaming has Compound Benefits — we generate more content and get followers which could lead to stronger network effects. It also has Diffuse Benefits — even if the stream is somehow an unmitigated disaster, we’ll still come away with a lot of video content and better understanding about what works on social platforms. Finally, it’s certainly Easy to Follow because it’s specifically designed to make our life easier by removing the hassle of video editing.
The SuccessCast
This hack leads us to the launch of our “SuccessCast”. Over the course of our series we hope to interview many of our successful friends and RezScore users on the subject of how they have hacked their way to success, and present a lot of our own research along the way. If you are interested please send us your favorite hacks, and subscribe to our video channels here:
Comprehensive List of Success Hacks
As we continue to describe our favorite success hacks we will keep this list updated:
- Practice in public: 3/3
- Busy work at bedtime: 2.5/3
- Replace “I Don’t Know” with “I’ll Find Out”: 3/3
- The Two Minute Rule: 2.5/3
- Using a “You” Focus: unrated
- Get a Free Lunch: 3/3
