Slope vs. Dots

We talked about not beating yourself up a bit a few weeks back in a post and a podcast, and a bunch of members loved the sentiment. Lots of people - probably including you - have been treating themselves like the roadrunner treats Wile E Coyote (my son was somehow watching one of these the other day and I’m not sure what lesson we’re teaching here?) This is a kids show?

Anyway, despite the obvious benefit to being kinder to yourself, members had questions. The most common one was some version of this:

“How do I measure progress and hold myself to a high standard without beating myself up?”

This is a tough question in entrepreneurship, because most of the things you do won’t “work” the way you expected or hoped. If you run ten experiments for customer acquisition, one might work pretty well and nine might not work at all. So, how to you judge that?

The answer is to recognize slope vs. dots.

Dots in life are irrelevant, but they’re easy to measure so nearly everyone measures them. They show you where you are right now. When you look at Instagram and see someone on a beach while you’re washing dishes, there’s a stark difference in dots.

Dots are a massive problem because they don’t take into account time. Once you introduce time, you realize that dots aren’t comparable. Because time introduces other dots, which introduces slope. That might look like this:

Your slope looks pretty good.

And when you include time, you realize you can’t compare to the beach person. You don’t know what else is happening in their life. You don’t know their other dots so you can’t know their slope so you can’t compare yourself to them.

The other great part of leaning into slope vs dots is that nothing that happens is bad, because it’s all relative to the next dot. Something “bad” is just a dot with an opportunity to improve your slope with your next dot.

So this:

Becomes this:

The way to hold yourself accountable when most things don’t work is to measure your slope, not your dots.

When you’re struggling, focus on improving your slope. It’ll get you where you need to go.