Brian Chesky
Add a Zero
Inspired by Brian Chesky episode
Brian Chesky's exercise: take your goal, add a zero. Aiming for 100? Try 1,000. Forces different thinking. Works for parenting goals too.
Brian Chesky has a thinking exercise: take your goal and add a zero. If you're aiming for 100 of something, what would it take to hit 1,000? The point isn't actually hitting 1,000. It's that adding a zero breaks your brain out of incremental thinking.
You want to read to your kid 3 times this week. Reasonable. You'll forget by Wednesday.
Now add a zero. What would 30 times look like?
Your brain immediately malfunctions. Thirty times? That's reading at red lights, on the toilet, in grocery store lines. Books in every room. Two sentences counts. You're doing voices for cereal box ingredients. Bedtime book, wake-up book, meltdown book, bribery book.
You won't hit 30. You'll hit 8. But 8 is 266% better than 3, and you only got there because adding a zero forced you to stop "optimizing your schedule" and start thinking like someone who's completely lost touch with what's reasonable.
The zero isn't the goal. It's permission to get unhinged with the solution.
