If you’re only focused on providing value to massive amounts of people, you’re going to lose.
This might confuse you since last article all I had to say was that you should be providing more value to more people to reach any goal you want. This is true. However, without refining your ideas, testing hypotheses and knowing how to provide value, you won’t be able to do this for long.
This is what we like to call going deep AND going wide. Helping 10 AND 10,000. You can’t have long term success with one when disregarding the other. And to get better at one, you have to do the other. It is a never ending cycle.
Especially in health and fitness, if you’re not using the one on one deep interactions to power the wide, scalable value you’re lost. And if you’re not using the wide to then power the deep, you’re just flat out losing.
To be clear, deep and wide are inherently two completely different value positions. One has to be more specific and one has to be more general.
Deep: The less people you reach, the more specific the value has to be.
Wide: The more people you reach, the more general the value has to be.
This is a very surface level understanding and very obvious. Working one on one, you’ll deal with very individual circumstances and problems. Dealing with a larger population, you have to be more general to accommodate more individuals.
Example A: Someone has right shoulder pain lifting overhead because of an overhead exercise, also has had two previous surgeries, and works at a desk all day long. You’ll have a specific solution (value) for this person.
Example B: People who work at desks for longer than 12 hours a day that tend to get shoulder pain. You’ll have a more general solution (value) for these people.
In both occurrences, you can help with shoulder pain. But, going deep versus wide the right way will lead you to being able to provide better value, much quicker. Knowing how to provide specific and individual value will help provide general value.
That is just the first step of the cycle. If you stop there, you’ve lost. You then have to see what worked and didn’t work with the general value, to then help the next specific value. To do this most effectively, you must use science.
Science progresses our understanding of, well, everything. And to be successful, you must be a scientist. You must form hypotheses, test them, provide solutions, then scale those solutions an collect data to find and test new hypotheses.
In other words, to provide more value, you have to run deep and wide experiments like a scientist.
Deep: Testing hypotheses and solidifying techniques and approaches.
Wide: Gathering data to formulate hypotheses to test.
Example A: First, you go deep. You need to be specific in testing a hypothesis. When this happens, we get that outcome. When you are successful at doing what you need to do to obtain your desired outcome, BINGO! That’s your value you expand to others. This is only the first step, however.
Example B: Now you go wide and provide that value to 10,000 people instead of 10. From expanding your reach, you get a massive amount of data which leads you to new hypotheses to test.
Example C: You go deep, test a new hypothesis, and come up with better value. You go wide, test that value on a large population, then form new hypotheses. See how this works?
In other words, for people in the health or fitness industries:
Deep: Working one on one with someone to fix a very specific problem using very specific tools
Wide: Extrapolating the success you had with the one on one interaction to help a more general population
Using our backgrounds, we’ll give you two examples.
Example A: I’m working with someone on nutrition and find that low carb works for someone who is trying to manage weight and get blood sugar response under control. I make a low carb product or educational service for people who are trying to lose weight or control their blood sugar. I see how they respond, see some trend, and then use that data to help the next person with weight management issues.
Example B: Ryan’s working with someone who has shoulder pain when lifting overhead and find that he improves it by doing stability exercises. He teaches a workshop online or in person and collects data from thousands of people how they respond to stability exercises and notices different data. Then, he uses that information to help the next person with shoulder pain.
Steve Jobs didn’t make 100 million 1st generation iPhones without obsessively making ONE at Apple HQ in Cupertino, California. He went deep, then he went wide. Then, based on what 100 million people said, he formed hypotheses on how they used phones and what they needed it for. They went obsessively back to work, went deep, and made ONE 2nd generation iPhone before they went wide and launched 150 million the year after. And back and forth, round and round it goes.
If you’re not going both deep and wide, you’re not improving, you’re not growing, and you’re not increasing your value production.
What are you doing specifically now that could be general later? How can you go deep AND wide?
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