When you face a challenge, how do you know how much effort to put into solving it? How do you determine whether you’re preparing or procrastinating?
When I was 21, I got sick with a complicated and poorly understood illness. After seven years homebound and bedbound, I got test results that suggested a surgery might be able to cure me. The problem? No good surgery existed.
I was neither a surgeon nor a doctor, but I was unwilling to live sick if there was a chance I could be well. So I decided I would invent the surgery and convince someone to give it to me. But to take on the challenge, I needed to figure out how to know when I was ready to pitch the idea to surgeons.
To do this I developed a tool: the cost of trying.
The cost of trying is the preparation it takes to put out a best effort. Some tasks are low cost of trying; others are high. The most powerful way to use this tool is to combine the cost of trying with the cost of failure and plot them, low or high. When you do that, you have a two-by-two matrix, and it reveals the strategy most applicable to your task.
Plotting the Costs and then Plotting Your Course
1. Low cost of trying, low cost of failure: repeat action
If you determine that the cost of putting out a best effort is low and the cost of failure is also low, then taking repeated action is your best path to achieving your goal.
When I was developing the surgery, the quintessential low-cost-of trying activity was searching for medical papers on some aspect of adrenal surgery. Even if the search came up empty, the only cost was the effort it took.
Eventually, that’s how I got my first big break. After a year of looking, I found a single page from an online Georgia State lab manual explaining how to do the surgery I needed on rats. It wasn’t a solution, but now I had momentum.
If your task falls within quadrant 1, keep trying until you succeed.
2. High cost of trying, low cost of failure: try early
This is the “move fast and break things” quadrant. It’s where much of tech lives. When the cost of trying is high but the cost of failure is low, your best bet is to try early. You want to try early to see if you can succeed while also avoiding some of the preparation associated with a best effort. Don’t let “perfect” be the enemy of “good.” Beta testing for an app or feature is one example of trying early. So is iterating with your audience on a product, and so is preselling a book or online course.
3. High cost of trying, high cost of failure: preparation
This is the high-stakes quadrant. Meticulous preparation can set you up for success, but anything less steers you toward costly failure. The preparation quadrant can feel like it’s the toughest to manage, but it’s not. Preparation gives you a strong way to influence the outcome, so you’re not helpless, you’re just taking on a lot.
4. Low cost of trying, high cost of failure: speculation
One word best describes the risky tasks here: speculation. Think Russian roulette: a grim game of chance where the cost of failure is death. Preparation does little to bend the odds in your favor. There’s no way to mitigate the risk if the cost of trying is low and the cost of failure is high. Unsurprisingly, this is a no-go zone for most things.
So, when does it make sense? Two situations come to mind.
The first is when you have a new insight. If the world sees the task as high cost of failure with no way to avoid the risk, but you devise a way to prepare, then you push the task into preparation. The 1979 MIT Blackjack Team did this when they figured out how to count cards in casinos and to consistently beat the house.
The second situation is if the payoff is high and you can easily weather the loss. This describes a lot of the venture capital world. They expect a series of failures to cost them millions, but they hold on until they find the success that makes them billions. Long odds pay off big-time if you win, and if you can afford the loss, sometimes it can be a competitive advantage.
The-Cost-of-Trying Matrix Helped Me Persevere and Win
I used this tool to help save me when I faced my life’s biggest challenge. I realized I was in quadrant 3: high cost of trying and high cost of failure. I needed to prepare, and prepare some more. So I did. It took me four years to develop the surgery and build the medical team to undertake it.
My surgery was a success; it was eventually done on both of my adrenal glands. I got my health back, and the surgery is now the standard of care at several hospitals for a related rare disease.
You don’t have to wait until your life is on the line to use this matrix. Plot your to-do list and work tasks onto it. Once you do, you can be confident you’re spending your time taking action when it’s most advantageous and preparing when it’s most necessary.