“Everything starts small” ~Steve Aoki That which you are working towards is likely large, but everything you see in front of you was once small. And each step through the journey from small to large has to be meaningful or you won't make it to the next step. Steve Aoki started out playing gigs for 5 people and had to make it meaningful for them before he could sell out festivals and make it meaningful for millions.
Hunter Powers: Welcome to the one. I'm your host, Hunter Powers, broadcasting live from our nation's capital, DC proper, Washington DC. Today's one idea is everything starts small. This is a quote from Steve Aoki. Steve is a quite famous DJ and electronic music producer, the world of EDM. And he just put out a new book called Blue where he talks about getting started and getting started on many different things.
Hunter Powers: And so today, we will look at his quote, everything starts small. What does it mean? Do we agree with it, and how can we use it? Everything starts small. What does it mean? The things that you see around you and in fact, everything. They did not start their life in the state that you see them. They had to start their life in a small state. There was a beginning and everything that you see had a beginning, and everything that you see had a small beginning.
Hunter Powers: Everything starts small, but we don't tend to see things in their small state. We tend to only see them once they get large enough to gain notice, gain attention. And according to Steve Aoki, everything starts small. Everything starts from a very, very small state and has to grow from there.
Hunter Powers: So, there's the literal interpretation that everything has started from this very small building block. We could trace the building of a house back to the planting of a seed for a tree. In his book, Steve describes this statement as a mindset. A way of thinking about things.
Hunter Powers: He talks about when he started out performing and he frequently would have 5 to 10 people at his show and that you had to treat it as a big deal. It had to be very meaningful, because if it couldn't be meaningful for the 5 to 10 people, it could never be meaningful for 50 people, for 500 people, for 5,000 people, for 5 million people. And if you can't make it meaningful, you can't get to the next step.
Hunter Powers: And that everything starts off small is a state of mind, because if everything starts off small, then every step has the potential to become big. So, we have both the literal progression and the state of mind.
Hunter Powers: Now, do we agree with it? Well, does everything start small? Can we find the edge case, the inflection point? The first thing that pops in my head is luck. Someone wins the lottery. They buy that $1 ticket and it turns into millions. I guess it depends on how you'd look at it.
Hunter Powers: In order for that one ticket to yield millions, millions of people had to come together and put their money in this pot. Millions of people bought lottery tickets, which made up this millions of dollars that you won. So, it started off with individuals all paying a dollar, small amounts of money to come together to this large thing.
Hunter Powers: And again, it depends on how you want to interpret that, but I don't find that to be a contradictory statement. We have the notion of overnight success, but in general, when you look behind an overnight success, you see a lot of hard work. A lot of hard work that led up to an inflection point where the success grew at a much, much higher rate.
Hunter Powers: We have this idea of virality, viral content. Someone records a video of their kid getting out of the dentist still high off the nitrous oxide and it gains millions of views overnight. Did that start small? And I guess it comes into what your definition of small is.
Hunter Powers: Still had to start with one person sharing it, but it's growth rate was not small. So, there are some things that have geometric growth, but we could also stop to consider what is the value of those things. Is it really even a thing in this context, the video of the kid saying things because they inhaled some gas?
Hunter Powers: Oh, it's funny and it's entertaining, but there's no long life to. It's not a career. It's not a building, not a business. And I guess what I'm getting at is perhaps everything is everything of substance. If I add that qualifier, then I can excuse the Charlie bit my finger video. So, everything of substance starts small.
Hunter Powers: I think it's a pretty hard statement to disagree with. Perhaps we could take the angle of while everything starts small, there's often a great amount of history behind it. Yes, it starts small, but it's standing on the shoulders of giants, which then I guess goes to the definition of what is small.
Hunter Powers: And unless you want to try to argue that nothing is small and that nothing starts small because everything starts on the shoulders of giants, which I don't think I would argue or the average person would argue, then it still holds true.
Hunter Powers: Everything starts small. We agree, we're in alignment and that alignment has started small. And so now. how can we use it? I was attracted to this quote from the mindset angle that Steve was pushing that if everything starts small, you have to treat everything as a big deal.
Hunter Powers: There's a seriousness to it that by default you dismiss because it's small. The thing that you are doing, the thing that you are working on, most likely you're doing it because of an outcome that you are moving towards, that you want, that you desire, that you've seen in someone else or something. Maybe not this exact one, but there's a corollary.
Hunter Powers: And when you start small, you feel that person, that thing would never be this, would never do this. I need to get to that final state. I need to be the King of the world, but that king of the world had to start small. And if you could acknowledge that, that King of the world was once in this state too, then this state becomes much more meaningful. You are doing the important work.
Hunter Powers: There's another quote, and I don't think we know who said it first, but it goes, "Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die. Everybody wants the result, but nobody wants to do the work." You've got to start small. You've got to go through the steps. You've got to take it seriously. You've got to focus on it. You've got to bring great value to it.
Hunter Powers: Because if you can't bring value to those five people, when Steve was playing a show for five people and it wasn't any good, you could never play a show for five million people. And if you're working on a business and you can't bring value to one person, how are ever going to do it for five million or 5,000 or 500 or even five? It's got to start with one and it's not meaningless, it's meaningful.
Hunter Powers: And maybe it goes back again to the life is a journey, not a destination thing. That in order to get to the destination, every step on the journey must be a destination. And why? Because everything starts small. And that is your one idea for today. I am Hunter Powers broadcasting live from our nation's capital, as we say in the city, DC proper. And until next time.