One piece of the magic of actually “doing” real work—thinking, writing it down, delivering it in some form, even if draft—is that once work is delivered (even in temporary, draft mode), it changes into a different mode. Psychologically and process-wise, it enters tweaking and improvement mode. Even if it is 1% done, it still enters tweaking mode.
As a result of this condition of both how the brain works and how organizations work, just starting to do something is very powerful because tweaking is much, much, much easier than starting.
To make this abstract point clear, let’s think about some examples:
- Imagine, your design team is talking and talking and talking about creating a logo. You know it will take a long time to create an awesome logo everyone loves. Either you can continue talking about concepts and styles or just create the first—admittedly, sucky—version of the logo. And then with that as a starting point, see what everyone loves (or, more likely, hates) about it and from there come up with different concepts. You see, just doing it (even if low-quality) pushes the ball much more than just talking about it.
- Imagine, you have to find a company to build a website, and you have absolutely no idea how to or even where to begin. You can either research it and think about what to do, or you can just Google, find 5 random companies, and call them up. Or you can just open up Google Docs and write an outline of the front page. You see, either of those two options suddenly moves the action from “brainstorm” mode to “okay, let’s review these companies to see which is best… oh and while we’re at it, let’s seriously look for more companies!” and/or “Okay, that’s an okay start for an outline of a site, now let’s change X and Y in the outline and flush out parts A and B.” Tweaking is much easier than starting.
This observation has a few noteworthy consequences. Let’s think through them.
First, this is hinting at a bigger psychological and emotional issue: starting things is hard. This is meant to reinforce and emphasize the importance of starting, even if small, by emphasizing the conceptual shift from “boot-up” to “tweaking.” In fact, it’s so hard emotionally and psychologically, that’s why most people just talk!
Second, you don’t need permission from anyone to start and do things. Just do them and tell people. “Better to ask for forgiveness than permission,” as the old saying goes.
Third, there’s an interesting marketing parallel. In fact, this is really just an application of a classic marketing principle. Framing it directly in marketing speak makes this argument clearer and stronger. The hardest part of getting someone to buy a product is convincing them to buy. Once they’re convinced to pay the price—whether high or low—is a secondary, minor, and much, much easier decision. In other words, deciding to spend $0 or “more than $0” on a product is a much more difficult process (for both the buyer and the seller) than the buyer deciding “should I spend $1 or $10?” Let’s think about this. Getting them to make the leap, that first step is so hard that it’s even secondary to charge 10x the price as you were thinking! The same applies here. Starting up something is so valuable that the exact details ($1 or $10?) pale in comparison in importance.
Finally, in this series, I often talk about delivering and completing items—hence sprints and deliverables, for example. That’s the other side of the coin. This side is starting. In fact, starting and finishing are the two hardest points of doing anything. Everything in the middle? Just focus, tweak, tweak, tweak, and you’ll do fine.
