The Lure of Incremental Improvement

Scott H. Young recently posted an interesting article claiming that steady, incremental improvement is a myth.

Scott argues that most successes actually occur in spurts, very similar to the tipping point phenomenon set forth by Malcolm Gladwell. Largely, I think this is correct; consistent effort over time eventually (but seemingly suddenly) leads to a large improvement.

I’d like to talk about why so many people believe in incremental improvement, and why so many people are sucked into this myth.

Scott touches on one reason, in that people tend to recognize the sudden increases in success, but neglect the preparation and work that led to them. I add to this that people often attribute these successes to luck or “genius” and thus don’t believe that sudden successes can happen to them, leaving incremental improvement.

More dangerously, incremental improvement is extremely safe and provides constant positive feedback. It’s very easy to feel good about your progress when you make small, consistent (but insignificant improvement), and this type of success rarely requires much difficult work or risk. Thus, it’s a very comfortable position which people will be eager to accept and adopt as their worldview.

This is the biggest reason for the success of the modern video games (especially role-playing games). The original crop of video games (think donkey kong, pac-man, galaga, etc.) were difficult to succeed at. Further, playing them a lot didn’t improve ones progress significantly unless you made a few quantum leaps in gameplay (learning how to manipulate the movement of the ghosts in pac-man, for example). Thus, there was very little incremental improvement, and the gaming community was small, relegated to those who would stick out the difficulty to really try to compete and learn the games.

Enter the recent wave of games which provide consistent progress and an almost guaranteed path to victory. Many modern games take much longer to complete, because they are a series of very easy steps (level up this character, follow this path, etc.) they must be long to create an illusion of difficulty. Thus, completing the game isn’t actually very impressive, but it feels much more impressive.

Of course, this only entrenches the common view of incremental improvement even further.

Heed the advice of Scott Young and seek out difficult challenges, where you have to really do something to succeed. The road may be less certain, but it is more rewarding.