Lessons - How the Red Queen Effect Will Ruin Your Life

Welcome to Lessons episodes of Success Story, part of the HubSpot podcast network. These lessons episodes will be shorter conversations with past guests, valued members of the success story community, and myself. They'll be focused on teaching you actionable, insightful takeaways that you can use to upscale your personal and professional life. Today, I'm going to be talking about the Red Queen effect, what it is, why it's scariest hell, why it definitely applies to you, and why you have to be cognizant of it to succeed in life in business. Red Queen effect at its very core is a phenomenon that applies to nature, to business, the technology, to medicine, to society. It's a concept that you always have to be adapting, evolving, in just an order to compete in order to survive. It applies to all these different fields, and you'll understand why, but I want to sort of paint a picture for you to really, I guess, wake you up to why this is so important. So to describe the Red Queen effect, I'm probably actually going to be describing a lot of people's nightmares. It's always a fun topic, right? So imagine this, you're running as fast as you can, but you're not moving. Think about this in like a nightmare dream context where you're sprinting away from some evil unseen entity, and no matter how fast you run, you can't move and you feel like you're glued to the floor, but you know you're running. This is, in theory, what the Red Queen effect feels like. You're constantly in real life, not even in your dream, you're running as fast as you can in terms of your business, your professional career, you're trying to keep, you're trying to keep yourself relevant, keep your business relevant. The same things that worked for your business 10 years ago no longer work for your business. I can imagine that when you take it out of a nightmare and put into reality, it may still feel like a nightmare, but it resonates with a lot of you. It's very unsettling, it's very scary, but it's very important to understand. New technologies are coming in, they're being discovered and improved upon daily, sometimes even hourly, and the feeling of running, yet still falling behind while everyone else is racing ahead is a very, you feel like you're missing it on opportunities while others are taking them. You feel like you're becoming irrelevant while there's other people that are becoming influential and killing it. And as stressful as this seems, there's some truth to it. However, there will be a silver lining, I'll get to it in a minute. This feeling and this phenomenon is not new. This feeling of running and trying to keep up and barely keeping your head above water. Where did this concept or red queen effect that tried to describe this feeling come from? Well, you know Alice in Wonderland, that's a book by Lewis Carroll. He also wrote the book through the looking glass. Now, in through the looking glass, there is a scene, there's a part of the story where Alice from Alice in Wonderland is in Wonderland and she's on a chessboard. She's running forward, the chessboard is moving backwards, and she's staying in place in the same place, even though she's running the chessboards, moving backwards at the same exact speed. And the red queen, the red queen, owns this chessboard or she rules it or whatever, is saying, this is a quote. Now here you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place if you want to go somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that. This concept and theory is called the red queen effect. I'll call it the RQE, so I don't belabor the red queen effect. This is a theory that applies to biology, nature, business, tech, medicine, society, entrepreneurship, personal development. It applies across the board. This was studied in terms of evolutionary biology by Levan Vaelin in 1973, what it means is that organisms in nature have to constantly adapt, evolve and compete in order to survive in a changing environment because those organisms in nature, their enemies are also evolving. Similar to how Alice was running, but she wasn't getting anywhere on the red queen's chessboard, organisms in nature are evolving, but they're not, they're not winning, for example. The best analogy I can give is if you're on a treadmill and you're running forward and the treadmill's going, you're not advancing, you're just literally staying in the same spot. And in nature, like I said, animals and their enemies and their rivals are always changing and improving. Everybody's running on the same treadmill. Frogs have to catch flies to eat and flies have to escape frogs to live, so frogs develop better tongues and better reflexes, flies develop better wings or figure out how to zig and zag and fly faster, but it's a never-ending race. No one can ever win. Charles Darwin based his famous book on the origin of species in 1859 around his concept. He saw that nature was very harsh. It was not peaceful. And this is a quote from Charles Darwin. He wrote, the most adaptable to change is the one that survives. Not the strongest, not the smartest. This rule applies in nature. This rule applies to every single person listening or watching this. This is the core rule of natural selection. It's a process of evolution. It means that living things that fit their environment better have a higher chance of living and having babies and passing on their good features to their babies. Those that fit their environment worse have a lower chance of living and having babies and leaving behind their bad features over time. This leads to the creation of new kinds of living things suited to their own places. The RQE is the reason why we have so many different and amazing life forms on Earth. It's also the reason why we have to keep running just to stay alive. Now, the RQE is not only a challenge for nature, it applies to business. In the business world, the environment is constantly changing. Technology, competition, regulation, and consumer preferences. To succeed in business, you have to keep innovating, learning, and improving. Otherwise, you're going to fall behind and you're going to lose market share. Here's an example, 1962 Warren Buffett bought a controlling stake in Berkshire Hathaway. It was a textile company. He thought he could turn it around by investing in new equipment, cutting costs, and diversifying into other businesses. But he realized that the textile industry was doomed. There were cheaper imports coming in from overseas to flooded the US market and no matter how much he invested, he could not keep up with the changing environment. So he's gone on record stating that the money he poured into the textile Berkshire Hathaway company was his biggest investing mistake he's ever made. And he shut down the textile operation in 1985 and focused on using Berkshire Hathaway as a holding company for his other investments. That is the Berkshire Hathaway that we know today. He learned from his mistake and he applied the RQE to his investing strategy. He understood the red queen effect and he applied it. How? Well, he started investing in businesses that were durable, competitive advantage, strong brand, loyal customers, high barriers to entry, businesses that could adapt and change and innovate continuously like Apple, Amazon, and Netflix. He turned Berkshire Hathaway into one of the most successful and respected companies in the world. What was the lesson? Well, he realized that he couldn't just run faster, aka investing more money. He had to run smarter, which is the actual secret key as to how you beat the red queen effect. Let me talk about how it applies to a couple other industries and then we'll talk about how you can apply it to your own life. How can you run smarter in your own life so that you do not succumb to the red queen effect? Like I mentioned before, it applies to business. It just gave you an example, technology, medicine, innovation, you name it. In medicine, it's actually quite interesting. There's a book called The Emperor of All Maladies. It's written by a guy named Mercury. It's a biography of cancer. It covers a history of cancer research and treatment from ancient times to present. And one, the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, it was a very well written book. One of the main themes of the book is the Arquee in cancer treatment. So the book shows how cancer is a constantly evolving and mutating disease that adapts therapies to drugs. To quote from the book, cancer is not a concentration camp, but it shares at least one trait with history's most tragic camps, an unceasing capacity to remember and to propagate its own suffering. Cancer cells, unlike normal cells, can activate telomerase, an enzyme that allows them to preserve their chromosomes indefinitely. Cancer cells can defy the normal cycle of senescence and death and they can grow relentlessly, adaptively and endlessly. So the Arquee in cancer treatment means that doctors and researchers have to keep running faster and faster just to stay in the same place, they have to keep developing new drugs and new combinations and new strategies and new technologies just to keep up with the ever-changing nature of cancer. But Arquee doesn't just apply to cancer, it applies to everything, right? And sometimes the worst outcome of the Arquee of the red queen effect is that the innovations that we create not only are not sustainable, but they also create other problems. Here's an example, the development of antibiotics. Created tons of treatments for infectious diseases, but also led to the emergence of antibiotic resistant bacteria. The development of vaccines eradicated deadly diseases, but raised ethical, social, political issues. The anti-vaccination movement, the distribution of vaccines, the protection of intellectual property rights. The development of the organ transplant industry saved many lives, but it also created a shortage of donors, a black market for organs and a debate over the definition of death. So you see that it's hard to keep up and even when we do keep up, sometimes we create more problems that we have to deal with. So this is just Arquee in medical advancement. A very practical application of Arquee in business and technology is what we're seeing right now with AI. AI is creating tons of opportunity. Machine learning enables all these new applications, all these new insights, all these new companies, but it generates tons of concerns about impact on human autonomy, privacy and employment. So Arquee applies across the board. And when it applies across the board, it applies to us. Not just a business problem, not just a nature problem, not just a personal problem, an us problem. It means that we, as people, have to run faster and faster and faster just to keep up. But we know running faster is not enough. We need to run smarter. So we need to run in a very particular way so that we as individuals, as professionals, as entrepreneurs, as leaders, we do not succumb to our queue. There's three things that we have to continuously internalize, so that we, as professionals, do not become irrelevant. First thing, adaptability. How do we change with the times? How do we be flexible, resilient, open-minded? How do we experiment? How do we fail? How do we learn? How do we diversify? Adaptability is how we survive. Second thing, foresight. How do we see the future? How do we be proactive, strategic and creative? How do we spot trends, opportunities, threats? How do we plan? How do we prepare? How do we deliver value? Foresight is how we succeed. And lastly, continuous learning. The mindset of continuous learning. How do we learn new things? How do we stay curious? How do we stay motivated? How do we stay self-directed? How do we access, evaluate and synthesize new information? How do we collaborate? How do we communicate? How do we share knowledge? Unus learning is how we grow. So these skills are not either or they're all in. They help us stay ahead of the curve, not just by running faster, but by running smarter. Because you, who's listening to this, you are professional in a dynamic and competitive field. And you will face threats from automation, globalization, disruption. If you're going to advance your career, you have to update your skills, your knowledge, and your network. And that will allow you to balance out your work, your life, and your health. You have to run smarter by developing adaptability, foresight and continuous learning. Because the RQE teaches us some very important lessons. Change is inevitable and accelerating. We have to embrace it, not resist it. Speed is necessary, but not sufficient. We have to be strategic and reactive, and value is relative, but dynamic. We have to create it, not just capture it. See, the RQE is a race we can't win by running faster. We have to run smarter. Now, I get that this video and this podcast, if you're listening to it, may seem a little doom and gloom. But I just want to change the lens. I want to leave you with a few thoughts on how to see RQE as a blessing, not a curse. Because I know what some of you are thinking. How do we always just run faster and faster to keep up? But see, when you adopt the mindset of some of those adaptability, foresight and continuous learning, it allows you to outpace the RQE. It allows you to run smarter. It makes you a more dangerous human being in a professional capacity. It forces you to continuously upskill, and I would even make the argument that even after you're retired and say, Hey, Scott, I'm checked out of my career. This doesn't apply to me. I say it does because I personally believe that when you stop working and you do nothing, I'm not saying you take a step back. You do nothing. That is when you start dying. I think that that's when your physical health, your mental health and well-being, I think that by not challenging yourself cognitively, listen, I'm not a doctor, but I'm sure it doesn't do much good for people that are prone to dementia and Alzheimer's. I love when individuals, after their professional career, they take on things to stay physically and cognitively well and adopting the RQE forces you to look at your life and take a really hard look at MI actually continuously upskilling myself, even if it's not at the capacity that I did when I was earlier on in my career. Am I still forcing myself to be slightly better every single day? This will be a net positive impact on your own life. This will be a net positive impact on the lives of people around you. Keep in mind, even if you're retired, you still have peers, you still have kids. You still have grandkids that you can actually have a very positive impact on if you continue to develop yourself. Here's a quick survey. This is what you should do just so you understand where you're at and where you want to go. So take an assessment of your life. Where are you? Where do you want to go? Leave your goals, dreams, opportunities, threats, do a SWAT analysis on your own life. You will ask these questions and you'll start to find gaps in areas for improvement. You can also compare yourself with your peers and your rivals in your life and your business, see how you stand out. This is the first step of self-awareness and self-improvement. Develop a plan for growth and development. What are the skills you have to improve on where you need to learn and improve? How do you track your progress? What actions and steps you need to take? This is just outlining basically a life roadmap to upskill yourself and then execute and iterate. Do your plan. Learn as you go. Try new things. Learn new things. Act on those. Act on learning the gaps in your skillset and your knowledge base. You will turn yourself into this self-directed and self-optimized individual and that is an incredibly powerful career strategy that is incredibly powerful leadership strategy, business strategy, when you constantly think how do I work smarter to outpace the RQE. You don't have to be scared of the red queen effect. You use it as a catalyst to spark your own growth in your development. Know that it exists. Know that if you do nothing, you will become out of touch. You will become irrelevant over time and don't think about this as a bad thing. Think about this as a spark for your growth and development. Think about it as a push for personal innovation, for business innovation, for personal excellence, for business excellence, you can use this to be more successful. You can use this to learn more, to be more happy, to have a more fulfilled life. All the personal development things that come from this are net positives. You'll lean into it. Be cognizant. Be aware that the RQE is a way to get ahead in the world that's always moving. And apply it to your life so that you don't become complacent, you don't get outdated, you don't become irrelevant, and you don't feel like the world's moving faster. And so you don't feel like you can't keep up with an ever evolving world.