A Simple Process to Drive More Progress

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Begin with Why

Simon Sinek wrote about starting with why and flipped the script on business development in doing so. Many won't start here; those who already deftly swing along the ropes of business and sales may feel this is unnecessary. If you already know how to make money with your own resources and tenacity, what does the reason behind why you do it matter?

Time will tell.

Time will tell you why you want to know the motivation for your life. Countless wealthy and successful people are miserable despite possessing more than most and earning accolades and external validation that should fill even the thirstiest man's cup.

Why are so many people so sad even though they have checked the proverbial boxes? Because earning is not enough.

Because we are socially connected human beings with relatively short lifespans who ultimately need to leave a legacy in the hearts and minds of those who walk behind us (the next generation) and those who walk beside us (our own generation).

In this relay race of life, the baton must be passed, and we are satisfied when we get to pass the baton to a teammate on the same mission as ourselves; we call this mentorship.

Suppose your mentee shares the same mission as you, and your mission is to gain vast wealth. In that case, you will have many mentees but few whom you can connect with on a heart and soul level, the kind of person who makes you feel optimistic about the future because they can see the same dream you have come true in their lifetime.

This is why it matters to ask the question "why." It will sustain you when the days are long, and you are weary; it will connect you to the present and the future, and you can live your life knowing you have tried your best to imprint something truly valuable onto the world.

Decide on Scope

Nine women cannot have a baby in one month. I used to quote this ridiculous analogy all the time to project managers breathing down my neck about deadlines in an Agile sprint cycle. No matter how you divide your time, there is a quantifiable amount of energy and hours in a day that you can produce work; be realistic.

Scope is the amount of work you plan to deliver in a given time period. Given your limited resources (we all work with constraints of one kind or another), scope is the realistic amount you or you and your team can produce by the due date.

To decide on the scope, first, enumerate the project elements as separate tasks. Each task can be considered a work item relating to a component of the finished product.

Let's say you are writing a book. The book's cover, the contents (likely subdivided into work items), marketing, presales, editing, distribution, and so on are all components of writing and launching a book. The scope of the book will be determined by time and resources.

Each work item can be linked to a row in a spreadsheet or a card in a project management app such as Jira, Notion, Monday, etc. Employing a systematic process for tracking any project of any size is simply headache prevention medicine. Often, the best painkiller is premeditation.

You can safely say that you know where you are going AND where you are at any given point in your project timeline. Check off the "well-organized" box and pat yourself on the back.

Prioritize the Critical

Time, money, human capital; the trifecta. The added benefit of enumerating work items for any project via the definition of scope is the clarity this process brings to your ability to distinguish the important from the "nice-to-have."

Continuing with the example of writing a book, if you decide you would really like to have a section of the book that dives deeply into a specific research area, but this research will add another three weeks to your schedule, you can prioritize the research "feature" of the book against the overarching mission of the book (the why) and decide if adding three weeks to your schedule aligns with the intention and resources you have available. If not, scrap it and put it in the nice-to-have pile.

Perhaps the book will have a reprint. It will be so wildly successful, and you can delve into the depths of research a la Michael Crichton style to your heart's content.

What is important to you now is completing V1, version one of your project. If you never complete the first version, there is no project, and whatever you are building, for all intents and purposes, does not exist. Complete the project by focusing on priority items only. You will learn how to be ruthless with your own work, and when you do, you will see that ideas are cheap and easy; completion requires tenacity and focus, setting you apart from most of the pack.

Find Your People

Even loner coders need to look into the eyes of other humans once in a while. When given my preference, I am a lone wolf and a firm believer that thought work is done best in isolation. Collaboration, however, is far more accessible and more effective face-to-face.

If you are building anything at all, you will need input from other humans; AI won't cut it here.

Talk to your customers, readers, and audience; tell people what you are doing so they can be your first wave of fans.

It will take longer than you think to get the feedback you can use in your work to iterate and improve upon, and you likely won't get feedback from the sources you would expect, i.e., family and friends.

Listen, the hard truth is that everyone else is living their lives; they likely have no idea how painfully hard it is to start a business, write a book, or create anything designed to be purchased or consumed by strangers. They have no idea, and they don't have a responsibility to give you feedback.

You must find and build your audience; these are the people who care about what you are creating.

Ship the Work

Seth Godin calls us to keep it simple by getting our work out into the world first and foremost, ship the work.

Nothing exists if what you create never sees the light of day via a reader, listener, viewer, or buyer. Your task as a builder is simple: at the end of the process, a deliverable must be released into the wild.

It is funny how many of us miss this important detail and cling precariously to our work as though it will prevent us from drowning, while our clinging will do just the opposite, drown us in a sea of edits, unimportant detail, irrelevant feedback, and worse, sunk costs.

No, it is not ready yet, and yes, you can add something significant, but no one knows about the parts you leave out, so let them stay that way until the reprint. Give yourself a break and get to your milestones. The only way to do so is to ship the work.

Iterate

Stagnation is death; the end is the beginning of the next round — get used to this.

You know the bad guys in platform games like Mario, and how, with each level, you must master the new skills required to beat the next level? Life is like this, too.

You don't learn cool things to say you can do them; you work to master a new complex skill so you can know it and have it on hand the next time you need it.

Iteration is how we build upon what we already know; iteration is the constructive path out of failure to learn from and develop from mistakes. This process builds strength in you and what you build.

Nothing left to chance and shipped without testing will stand up to competition. The result of the battle test or user acceptance test is the same: a resilience that can only be gained through iteration.  

The summary of the Iterative Build Process:

1. Know your why

   1. To get started, watch this.

2. Define the scope

   1. Define the components to be delivered in a given sprint or phase of a project.

   2. All the sprint work combined will amount to the scope of the total project.

   3. This step is about breaking the big thing into parts and attacking the parts in a logical order.

   4. The next step becomes simple once you have broken down the project in this way.

3. Prioritize

   1. This is when you decide what is really necessary versus nice to have.

   2. Don't be attached to extras that don't relate to the core of your project. This is when you kill your darlings or at least put them on the bucket list for a later date.

   3. Priority means the first version won't ship without it; everything else is backlogged or for a later date.

4. Collaborate & Feedback

   1. Find people excited about your project who will give generous feedback.

   2. Find people (maybe the same ones) to whom you can give feedback generously.

   3. The world works in reciprocal ways; remember this.

5. Ship the Work

   1. Seriously, done is good; perfect is impossible. Let others get eyes, ears, hands, whatever, on your work, and then do the next step.

6. Iterate

   1. While it was done once good enough, now is your opportunity to make it shine and incorporate some of that generous feedback where appropriate.

Until next week — Sonia, a.k.a SuperSonic 

Podcast Update!

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Watch a sneak peak of episode 2 below…

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