A New Way To Think About ‘The Domino Effect’

I read a fantastic book this year, which I heartily recommend, called The One Thing. In it, the authors offer a great insight into the power of geometric progression and how it can apply to our everyday lives. They talk about the work of the physicist Lorne Whitehead and what he was able to demonstrate by setting up and knocking down dominoes. We have all seen the chain reaction that happens when you line up dominoes in this way, but what Whitehead showed was that each falling domino could knock down another domino that was 50% bigger. Below is a demonstration based on Whitehead’s work.

This is an idea that translates into a great metaphor for how to tackle a big long-term goal, as the creators of this commercial about retirement planning, who borrowed the concept, show.

Now, I have talked about geometric progression before in terms of economic savings, and this is a great way to illustrate that point again. But the bigger message I got from reading about the concept in the book is how this idea of one tap in the right direction leading to bigger and bigger results extends to so many areas of life.

Too often, we look at the magnitude of an end goal and find it overwhelming. That’s because we too often think in terms of linear progression, like a long trail of standard dominoes, where every step along the way requires the same expenditure of energy to get the same kind of return.

But the geometric model is much closer to the reality of what progress in life is like: With each successful milestone in your journey, you amass more energy. You develop an effective new patient experience and you find that creates momentum for acceptance of larger cases, which drives new scheduling strategies, which drives new team alignment strategies… and so on.

So ask yourself: What is the one thing you can do today that will have a real impact on tomorrow? What is that first little domino in your chain, and what you do have lined up behind it? As long as you know where you are going and have lined up your strategy correctly, all it takes is to get going and tip over that first tile. The obstacles will keep getting bigger as the stakes get higher, but if you stick to your plan, you’ll find you have the momentum to keep knocking them over.