Butterfly Effect: Tiny Changes, Huge Impact

The power of small actions

🏷️ Categories: Mathematics, Time, Mental models.

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What if a tiny action could change the course of all humanity?

In A Sound of Thunder, a short story by Ray Bradbury, a group of hunters travels back in time to hunt dinosaurs. They’re given one clear instruction: don’t touch anything that isn’t designated to be killed. But one of them accidentally steps on a butterfly... When they return to the present, everything has changed—language, politics, society. A single mistake—a stepped-on butterfly—altered it all.

This is the butterfly effect.

No one can anticipate all the possibilities of an action, no matter how small. We live in an increasingly complex world, where each action spreads like a ripple. Understanding how the tiny becomes massive is more useful than ever.

When you realize that every action is a potential trigger, your mindset changes.

What the Butterfly Effect Is Not

First, a clarification. The butterfly effect is not “small action = big result.”

It’s often misinterpreted as the idea that, if we find the right action, it will trigger a massive chain reaction of positive outcomes. But no— the butterfly effect is not a "lever" you can pull at will.

Sometimes, a small action will have no effect at all. Other times, it will be the spark of unimaginable change. And the key is: you won’t know which action it will be.

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The Curious Discovery of the Butterfly Effect

The concept originates with a meteorologist named Edward Lorenz.

In the 1950s, Edward was trying to build a model to predict the weather. The problem was simple: existing models didn’t work. So he developed his own, based on complex calculations. One day, he rounded one of the initial condition values to make a prediction. He typed 0.506 instead of 0.506127.

He expected that this tiny initial change wouldn’t matter... But it did.

The result was completely different (Motter & Campbell, 2013).

A 0.025% change in the initial conditions changed everything.

That small decimal difference radically altered the forecast. If something so minimal could dramatically change the outcome, then accurately predicting long-term weather became impossible. In fact, in any complex system, a tiny change in the initial conditions leads to unpredictable outcomes.

Lorenz published his findings in 1963, which would later form the foundation of chaos theory.

The message was clear: we cannot predict the behavior of complex systems beyond the short term, because there is literally no way to know their initial conditions with absolute precision.

And that doesn’t just apply to weather. It applies to nearly everything in life.

The Butterfly Effect in Economics

Imagine this: you’ve launched a digital product. A confused user sends you a message. You have two options: ignore it or respond kindly.

You respond.

That grateful user writes a positive review. That review is seen by someone with a large audience who’s intrigued by your app and shares it on their social media. Your user base explodes overnight.

All because you replied to a message.

It’s a simple example, but systems can be this sensitive. You can’t know which small detail will be the catalyst. A button design? A phrase in a campaign? A share from someone influential? Every action should be intentional, because you don’t know which one will be the butterfly. You only get clues.

Business is like the weather in this way. We can estimate it, not predict it.

And when we talk about the global economy, it’s like trying to predict the weather worldwide.

Today’s globalized economy is a web so tightly woven that a tremor in one corner can become an earthquake in another. Markets don’t follow linear rules. They are chaotic systems, deeply sensitive to initial conditions. A president’s statement, a law, a rumor—any of them can be the flap of wings.

The global Covid-19 crisis is the most striking example of the butterfly effect.

So, What Do We Do If Almost Everything Is Unpredictable?

Expand Your Luck Surface Area

The answer lies in exposing ourselves more to the possibility of the extraordinary.

Increase your “luck surface area.”

Much of what we call luck is the result of thousands of small actions accumulated over time. The more you do, share, learn, and connect, the more likely you are to stumble upon an unexpected opportunity. The more likely you are to find that butterfly.

When you have to choose, pick the path that exposes you to more connections, learning, and experiences. Repeat it many times, and the likelihood that one of those decisions leads to extraordinary opportunities will grow over time.

• It’s hard to get lucky when you're home doing nothing.

• It’s easy to get lucky when you go to events, meet people, and learn every day.

To find more and better opportunities, expand your luck surface area every day.

✍️ Your turn: What small actions have led to huge changes in your life? For me, writing has been one of them. It was never in my plans—around a year ago, it would have been unthinkable for me.

💭 Quote of the Day: It fell to the ground, a delicate thing, a small thing that could tip the balance and topple a row of small dominoes, then large ones, and then gigantic ones over the years. Killing a butterfly couldn’t be that important! Could it...?
— Ray Bradbury, A Sound of Thunder

See you in the next letter! 👋

References 📚

1. Bradbury, R. (2013). A Sound of Thunder and Other Stories. Harper Collins.

2. Lorenz, E.N. (2004). Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow. In: Hunt, B.R., Li, TY., Kennedy, J.A., Nusse, H.E. (eds) The Theory of Chaotic Attractors. Springer, New York, NY.

3. Motter, A. E., & Campbell, D. K. (2013). Chaos at fifty. Physics Today, 66(5), 27–33.