The flapping of a single butterfly's wing today produces a tiny change in the state of the atmosphere. Over a period of time, what the atmosphere actually does diverges from what it would have done. So, in a month's time, a tornado that would have devastated the Indonesian coast doesn't happen. Or maybe one that wasn't going to happen, does. (Ian Stewart, Does God Play Dice? The Mathematics of Chaos, pg. 141)
In 1960, MIT meteorologist Edward Lorenz stumbled upon the butterfly effect, one of the most vivid examples of the chaos theory, while trying to model the weather by solving equations on a computer. One day he decided to restart a run he had done the day before, but this time from the halfway point. The output started exactly the same way it had previously, but then began to drastically diverge. This befuddled him since his equations and starting point had been exactly the same.
How could the output be so different? There was one slight difference- Lorenz had rounded off the fourth decimal place of the starting number the second time around. The implications were both surprising and overwhelming since people had always presumed that a slight change in a cause would just slightly change the effect. This was not the case. It is possible that a very small occurrence can initiate a series of increasingly significant events causing unpredictable and even drastic results.
Imagine an affiliate marketer promoting through a pay-per-click search engine raises their bid on a particular campaign by a penny, in turn forcing competing ads to raise their bids. And this CPC rise causes one of the advertising companies to run over budget and end all of their campaigns early for the quarter. The absence of this one company opens the occasion for other companies to get exposure for their ads.
One of these new companies suddenly discovers a wildly successful combination of keywords and ad copy, leading to a record quarter which results in the close of a round of financing that was previously on the fence. This company with its new found resources develops an organization which eventually goes public, triggering a series of IPO’s in the affiliate space, changing our landscape forever. Pretty chaotic, huh?
Your daily inputs into your company, your life, even the world no matter how insignificant or minuscule they may seem could lead to drastic effects. Still recovering from the holiday weekend and feel like slacking a bit? That one phone call you didn’t make or that one lead you didn’t feel like following up with could have lead to a million dollar relationship. Every action you take or don’t take has a price and a payoff. Have purpose with every breath of your life to ignite a butterfly effect that leads to a greater payoff than a price.
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