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The Parable of the Screws

If you have 3 screws, you can carry them in your pocket. If you have 6 screws, twice as many, you can do pretty much the same.

But if you have 30 screws, you are going to have a hard time fitting them all into your pocket. You’ll at least need multiple pockets, and you might have trouble sitting down. You’d need to find a container or get a rubber band or something.

30 screws is different than 3 screws, in an experiential way.

And if you have 300 screws, whatever method you used for 30 isn’t going to work. Should you get a bigger container, or use several smaller ones? If you have that many screws, chances are good that you have a few different types and sizes, and so you’d want to keep them organized with some kind of system; maybe you need separators and labels too?

Well anyway, if you have a system for hundreds of screws, and you start to acquire thousands of screws, at some point you will need a whole cabinet for screws.

And let’s face it, people who have a cabinet for screws are using screws frequently. They probably aren’t content to use only screws from their cabinet; they are buying screws on a regular basis. They have an account with a screw supplier and may want to start caring about how much screws cost.

It’s a whole new level. And this happens over and over again, both up and down the scale, on every dimension in the real world.

Every 10x is a whole new level

Ten times any amount, or a tenth of the amount, yields a qualitatively different experience.

This manifests in many ways:

And this is true at every “level”.