Inflection points are the time when a significant change happens, the turning point. They're something you can often easily spot looking backward, but looking forward, they appear hazy at best. In this episode, we examine the nature of inflection points, techniques to where inflection points might come, and how best you can utilize inflection points to accelerate significant change.
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Hunter Powers: Welcome to the ONE. I am Hunter Powers, broadcasting live from our nation's capital, Washington, DC. Today's one idea is finding inflection points. Inflection points are the time where significant change happens. The turning point. There's something that you often see in retrospect but rarely can predict for the future. Looking back, you see the moments where everything changed after that moment, but looking forward, it's often challenging to see where might everything change. In math, the inflection point is the point on a curve, if you think about a curve on a graph and it's changing directions, you might imagine that before the moment it changes directions it must flatten out a bit. Let's imagine we're going down and we're going steeply down, down, down, and there's some inflection point and then we're going to be going up, up, up, up. And you might think, "Well, there is going to be some ability to predict that inflection point because before we start going up, up, up, it must flatten out a little bit."
Hunter Powers: Of course it doesn't have to, but likely. Usually when you see a curve changing directions, there's some smoothness to it, but why would you want to find an inflection? What's the value there? Well, if you want to enact significant change, you want things to be considerably different than how they are now, then an inflection point is necessary. There is an alternate path which is very long, gradual change and there still technically mathematically is an inflection point over a very long gradual change, but you want to get to your destination, your goal, as fast as possible. And the faster that you can identify that inflection point, the faster you can get to the goal. So the challenge is then in finding the inflection point.
Hunter Powers: Where are your inflection point? Finding inflection points is often a very challenging task, but a very important task. And we want to know the exact moments where our ideas, our theories, and really our thesis begins to fail. You believe something is true and you believe it is true because of these, let's say 100 things. There are these 100 facts and let's not get into what all of the individual facts are, but there are 100 of them, 100 of these other ideas that support your belief, your thesis. It's funny how in science, in theory the land of facts, that nothing is true. It's something that you learned fairly early on in an engineering or science program of study that nothing is true. It is merely a suggestion of truth. You have theories, you have a thesis, you have a hypothesis, and then you have some data that backs up your hypothesis to suggest that something is true, but you never say, "And then I determined that this was true."
Hunter Powers: What you say is that the data suggested that this is true. And I want to say that most things in life that we say are true are really suggestions of truth. Your truths are beliefs and they are very strong beliefs. The sun will come up tomorrow, it's a very strong belief. There's a lot of good data that backs it up and I believe this fact. And you can believe in something but it doesn't mean that it's true. So the sun will come up tomorrow. Let's start there. This is my thesis. It's my belief and it's backed up by a lot of data and let's simplify that data and just say that the fact that every day I've been on this planet earth, the sun has come up. That's my main talking point that supports this idea, this belief.
Hunter Powers: And then probably the next most important talking point or bit of information, bit of data, is that no one is currently suggesting or at least no one prominent is currently suggesting that the sun is not going to come up tomorrow. I've got a whole lot of data that suggests it will and I have no data that suggests it won't. And so this is my thesis. My thesis is the sun will come up tomorrow. So the next question you should ask yourself after you form a thesis and in advanced mode, maybe you asked this question before you formed the thesis, but what are the inflection points of my thesis? Where does it all start to break down? At what point do I need to begin questioning the realities of my beliefs? And this can also be applied to someone else's beliefs that perhaps you don't necessarily agree with, but you need to determine where are the inflection points? What is the basis of their idea? Logical or illogical, it doesn't matter.
Hunter Powers: And then where must the inflection points be in that system of beliefs? The points where their idea begins to crumble. A quick sidebar, the point where a belief is established requires a far less information to establish than it does to destroy or discredit. There's an inflection point for a belief becoming a truth in an individual and then there's an inflection point for it not becoming true. What I mean by this, let's just say, let's continue with the sun metaphor for example. All right, so it's my first day on planet earth and I don't know what's going to happen but morning comes and the sunrises. And so they ask me at the end of my first day here on planet earth and I guess I already know how to speak because they're talking with me, but they ask me, "What do you think is going to happen tomorrow Hunter?" And I respond, "Well, the sun came up this morning. I think the sun will probably come up tomorrow morning."
Hunter Powers: A single data point. A single data point and I already have a pretty good feeling that the sun is going to come up tomorrow. And they might ask, "Well, how are you so sure on this?" And I say, "I don't really know, but it seems like that's the case." Let's now fast forward to day 10. It's day 10 on planet earth and the sun has come up every single day. And again they say, "Hunter, what do you think is going to happen tomorrow?" And I respond, "I think the sun will come up." And they say, "Well, how certain are you?" And at this point I'd say, "I'm pretty certain." And they say, "Why?" And I say, "Well, the last 10 days it's come up. I've seen it. It goes up in the sky and it burns." And I think it might have something out for me, but this is a pretty strong belief. Just 10 days in. The near certainty.
Hunter Powers: And how about that 11th day? Let's imagine the sun didn't come up. Day 11, no sun. And they come and they ask me, "Hunter, what do you think is going to happen tomorrow?" There's a little hesitancy, but I still respond that I think the sun's going to come up. And they ask, "Why?" And I say, "Well, the last 10 out of 11 days it came up and I don't really know what happened today, but still the preponderance of evidence suggests it's going to come up." And so while a single data point led me to believe that the sun would come up every single day, a single data point to the contrary does not lead me to believe that the sun won't come up. If the next 20 days in a row the sun doesn't come up and you asked me on day 30 now, "Hunter, is the sun going to come up tomorrow?" I would say, "Probably not."
Hunter Powers: But it's important to understand that the amount of information to get someone to accept a belief as their truth is far less than the amount of information required for someone to accept a truth has a falsehood. Now, going back to the original idea, how do we find these inflection points? A lot of people don't know where they are and a lot of people don't even want to acknowledge that an inflection point exists because it's counter to a truth. It's counter to their identity. A personal truth is really another word for our identity. What is our identity but a compilation of personal truths. And so if our identity is a compilation of personal truths, the suggestion that any of these truths might be a falsehood is really a suggestion that we have no identity or that our identity is merely a suggestion.
Hunter Powers: That person that is you, that is built up of these truths, might not be real. It might be a falsehood. What if you yourself you are a falsehood? Can you deal with that? Are you open to that idea that maybe you don't even really exist? Probably not. It sounds absolutely absurd and maybe that's one of your truths that I must exist. I exist, therefore I am. All right, so are we winding it a little bit back to finding these inflection points, but people don't like inflection points. People often balk at the suggestion that even an inflection point exists, especially when something has a lot of data, but they always exist. There's always an inflection point. It doesn't mean you'll ever face that inflection point, but the inflection point exists. That's one of my personal truths. And please don't suggest otherwise or I will have a crisis of identity, but how do you find them?
Hunter Powers: The trick to finding an inflection point is going to the extremes because the extremes are not based in our reality. And because of that, we are far more willing to consider the possibility. To consider all the possibilities. When it's based in reality, we're only able to consider the possibilities of reality, but when it's based in the absurd, well, then anything is possible. Why? Because it's absurd. And so as the first example of showing us, I chose the metaphor of the sun coming up tomorrow. If you wanted to get into an argument with someone that, why is it you're so certain that the sun will come up tomorrow? They would look at you as crazy, but it's also an idea where you're willing to really engage on it.
Hunter Powers: If I said, "What if your political party affiliation is not the correct political party affiliation, what are the inflection points?" If you found out that this little bit wasn't true, would you then become a Republican or a Democrat or remove yourself from any party? You would probably be very uncomfortable discussing that. But the sun coming up tomorrow, yeah, sure, we can talk about that one. Why? Because it's absurd it's not going to happen. So we go to the absurd and we find the inflection points. You might say, "Well, if the sun doesn't come up for 20 days in a row, that would be enough to convince me that maybe the sun won't come up tomorrow." So now we have something on the board. 20 days. The sun didn't come out for 20 days, then maybe it's not going to come up tomorrow. And now that we've found the extreme, we know that the inflection point must exist between where we are now and the extreme.
Hunter Powers: Again, imagine that curve that comes down and then goes back up. And let's say right now we're somewhere on the point where it's going down. We're going down, down, down, but we can't figure out what is the point where it turns and goes back up. But what we did find is a point where it's going back up. And so while before the inflection point was between now and infinity, because there was no other points to know of, now it's between where we are now and this point that we just established. That 20 days of no sun coming up, I'm willing to consider the possibility that the sun will not come up tomorrow.
Hunter Powers: And so the next part is to find the point between now and this new data point where we still believe or where our belief crumbles. And the most efficient way of doing this from a mathematical standpoint would be to have it. There's a technique in computer science called binary search, but the basic idea is you just split it in half and check to see whether you're still below or above and then whichever direction you need to go. If you're still above, well, then you split it in half going down again and checked where you are. Am I still above or below? And then if you were below, you then split it in half going up.
Hunter Powers: So we started with 20 days. We'd say, "Okay, good. What if the sun didn't come up 10 days? 10 days in a row. Would you still believe the sun will come up tomorrow?" And let's say that you say, "No, no, at 10 days I wouldn't feel confident." All right, so now we know that it's below that. So it's between a zero and 10 so now can you cut it in half. And at five days in a row, at five days in a row, would you still be convinced that the sun will come up tomorrow? You say, "Yeah, you know what? I still feel like that." Now you know it's between five and 10. Again, split it in half. So let's say we're at seven. "How about seven days?" And you're like, "I think that's the moment. So yes, if seven days in a row, the sun didn't come up, I would no longer be convinced that it will come up tomorrow." And you have found an inflection point.
Hunter Powers: And so how do you use these? There is change that you want or change that you want to consider. You hold a system of beliefs and you want to know how strong are these beliefs. These beliefs are impacting you, they're impacting others. You believe they are absolute, but what if they aren't? What if there are inflection points? Well, you can start doing these exercises to try to find where those inflection points are. Where those inflection points are in yourself, where they are in others, where they are in markets, because there is either some change that you are trying to enact or some change that you are trying to prevent or perhaps you just want to know more.
Hunter Powers: And so we will start in the absurd to open our minds and search for the most far reaching of points where it's already on that changed curve path and then we will use our binary search to attempt to find that exact moment where everything could change. And now as a small bonus point, if you can successfully get someone to do this, to go through this exercise, to go from there is no possibilities to, well, there is some possibility, but these series of things would need to happen, while you have already started in acting that change, you've already found some inflection point for them going from the belief that it is entirely impossible to perhaps merely that it is improbable, which, strictly mathematically speaking, is infinitely greater.
Hunter Powers: We've gone from zero to maybe 5% infinite. An infinite increase. So you're saying there's a chance. And that is your one idea for today. If you would like to help us spread the word, please give us a five star review and tell your friends to subscribe. We're available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and every major listening app. You can visit the website at one.hunterpowers.com to listen to the entire archive. And for even more follow @thehunter, that's me, on Twitter. I am Hunter Powers broadcasting live from our nation's capital, as we say in the city, DC Proper. And until next time-