Starting Small: The Advantages of Tiny Starts + 3 Ways to Grow Smarter

When you think about anything in life, it often comes from the smallest of things.

One idea. One hope. One vision. One seed.

All of these create the potential for greater things to develop.

Notice I said potential, not end product. The end product comes from creating the right conditions.

In this article, you’re going to learn about how to start small and how to grow in a sustainable way so you can set your self up for success in the long run.

You’ll also learn:

• Why starting small gives you the best chances at success
• How to utilize resources when you start small
• How to scale up appropriately

Let’s start (small).

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Planting the Seed/Idea/Blueprint

“The idea you have for a book, new invention, or play is real in your mind. That is why you can believe you have it now. Believe in the reality of your idea, plan, or invention, and as you do it will become manifest.” – Joseph Murphy, The Power of Your Subconscious Mind

Everything you want to do, be, or achieve has its roots in a potentiality.

The oak tree is in the acorn.

The mansion is in the blueprint.

The life change is in the visions you get in that state when you’re on the bridge of being asleep and being awake in the morning.

All of these things come from intangibles.

What are intangibles?

Intangibles are things you can’t experience with your five senses. Things such as:

• The belief you have in an idea, cause, or vision
• The love you have for a newborn child or puppy
• The feeling you get when you see a sunset or sunrise
• The drive and the motivation you have to pursue a goal no matter how long it takes or how hard it is.

You can say that “these aren’t intangible, there are actually chemical stimuli behind them”.

And sure, that is true – but the general feeling around them is intangible. It’s not something you can see or chart on a graph or something like that.

It’s like thinking of a dog. You can see that dog and picture that dog in all sensory vividness, but the dog doesn’t actually exist (in 3D, at least).

If someone does a scan of your brain, they won’t see a dog in your brain or field of vision. There’s something else at work there. Something spiritual, many would say.

Regardless, everything evolves from intangibles. These intangibles contain the “information” for the unfoldment.

Advantages of Starting Small (and the Disadvantages of Large Things)

“When in doubt, simplify.” – Eric Ries, The Lean Startup

When people think of “small and simple”, they might think of “weak” or even “powerless”. Nothing can be further from the truth. There’s a lot of advantages to starting small. Here’s some of them.

You Can Scale Up Appropriately

In today’s world, it’s very easy to make a big impact from a small start. Starting a business is a great example.

With the technology that is available in the average first world country, you could go online, register a company, come up with a minimum viable product (MVP), and start selling all within a day.

Eventually, with time, you can become serious competition for the big dogs.

In fact, in America – small business is the engine that drives economic growth.

If you stay small (especially as a business), you can decide to go to the next level at your own pace or just “maintain” your current position.

There’s Less Red Tape

When it comes to small groups, small teams, small whatever…there are less restrictions on getting things escalated than there would be in larger environments.

Going back to the example of business – if a small business wants to start, test, and launch an idea, it can do so a lot quicker. In large bureaucracies, there is a lot of waiting around for things to be approved and escalated.

By the time the “go” gets approved, the moment may have passed.

You Can Use The Slight Edge

By being small, you have less expectations placed on you. Everyone always looks up to the giants seeing if they’ll fail or not. As someone starting small, there’s more room to fail. The people with more visibility don’t get that luxury. You can make your mistakes in private.

Let’s say you start a business. In the beginning, you have little capital, little cash, etc… At this point, you can either succeed or fail. If you fail, you might have an employee or two that you have to let go and give severance. It might hurt, but not a big deal in the grand scheme of life – just another lesson.

If you do succeed, you can use the slight edge to your advantage. The slight edge is a philosophy that incremental gains over time can produce massive, inescapable results (which they certainly can).

Starting small allows you to take advantage of it in a sustainable way.

You Will Develop a Work Ethic

When you start small (or even start from nothing), you have to develop a strong and reliable work ethic to produce results.

If you aren’t from a rich family or someone who had a lot of advantages in life, you will have to work to etch your place in this world.

For myself, there were a lot of things that I wanted to do with my life and for many of them – I started from ground zero. It was only by the day in, day out grind that I was able to gain any sort of ground in them…and there’s still a long way to go.

Even if you do have many advantages in life, I can guarantee that there are things that those advantages don’t cover and you’ll have to start from the ground up – just like everyone else.

It’s like the spoiled rich kid who gets sent to military training. No matter how much money his parents have, only he can rely on himself to go through boot camp.

Creating the Fertile Soil: How to Start Small

There’s many ways to start small – but this is how I’d do it.

1. Scope Out the Territory

When you start out in any endeavor in life, you need to know where you are in relationship to everything around you. This is called “self-awareness”.

If you don’t have self-awareness, it’s safe to say that you are pretty much fucked with a capital F, so you need to be cognizant of these things.

Take stock of your weakness and your strengths. Know your capabilities and your limitations. Understand what’s expected of you and what is extra.

If you’re starting a new business, you need to know the competitive landscape. What advantages, disadvantages, threats, and opportunities are out there?

This is called a S.W.O.T. analysis.

2. Start With the Minimum Effective Dose

When you’re starting small, you may not have that many resources to spare (we’ll get to that soon) so what can do instead is use what is called “the minimum effective dose” or MED.

What the MED does is help you get the most out of the smallest part of whatever it is you are trying to maximize.

Going back again to starting a business, you may have little capital to spend on marketing, sales, and other business activities. And naturally, there are endless amounts of money to spend things on

What is the area you can spend that will give you a 1:10 or even 1:100 level of investment?

It might be digital advertising, it might be a new website, who knows. This is partially why self-awareness and a S.W.O.T. analysis is so crucial.

3. Resource Utilization

“Sometimes it takes having your back against the wall, leveraging your last dollar, and having no place to go but up, up, up if you expect something to happen. Because if you’ve got to succeed to survive, you will.” – Daymond John, The Power of Broke

As I just mentioned, starting small will often involve being resourceful. You will need to maximize the power of every dollar spent, every minute passed to succeed in whatever you’re trying to do.

Instead of using “business” as an example, let’s use a person (who is a “business” in their own right) who just left college. This person is 21 or 22. Let’s take stock:

• They have a degree
• They most likely have little money
• They have little experience
• They have bills to pay

This person may have a long climb ahead of them. But what resource will they most likely have a lot of? Time and energy.

They can use that energy that comes with youth with time to achieve things.

They can use it to advance their career, they can use it to start a business, they can use it to develop a social circle. So many things they can use it towards.

But instead, many people who are in their early to mid 20s absolutely piss that time away on drinking, spending time with people who aren’t doing shit with their lives, and not leveling up in personal development.

They then enter their 30s and continue the same behavior. Next thing they know they are 40 and they look back over their life with massive regrets.

Don’t be that guy.

Conclusion + Wrapping Up

Everything you want to do or achieve has its origins in a thought or idea. This thought or idea is the seed or the blueprint from which you make the larger thing.

Starting small can be a blessing IF you know how to do it in a purposeful manner.

It helps you scale up at your own pace, you have less “red tape” to go through, you can use the slight edge to your advantage, and you can develop a strong work ethic.

In order to do that, however, you need to have self-awareness, start with the minimum for the maximum, and utilize your resources effectively.

What was your experience with starting small? How did it go? Most importantly, what would you do differently if you could do it all over again? Let us know in the comments.