Shipping things sustainably

Why is it important: Being aware of this will help you power through areas where you don't have enough flow, and things are just hard – but will get a lot better if you keep going. But it will also help you move your ass and ship fast

Keywords

Motivation, Shipping

A. Dealing with the Dip

Main ideas:

Every skill worth getting good at has a dip. If there were no dip, then it would be too easy, and it wouldn’t be worth acquiring that skill. Memorable versions of this idea include Randy Pausch’s “The brick walls exist to keep others out”, and swyx’s “embrace the suck”

Because dips are so difficult, you shouldn’t commit to a dip unless you’re sure it’s worth it. Another way of saying this is that the worst thing to do is to quit halfway through a dip — it’s much better to decide beforehand the conditions for quitting, instead of quitting in the thick of things

Never quit out of panic. Quitting should always be thoughtful.

There’s a difference between being persistent with a person or organisation, and being persistent with a market. If you’re trying to get past The Dip in a market — then powering through repeated rejection is absolutely worth it.

The opposite of quitting isn’t ‘waiting around’. No, the opposite of quitting is rededication. If you decide to stick to something, then you should approach the dip with an ‘invigorated new strategy designed to break the problem apart’. The Dip is flexible — it becomes easier or harder to overcome depending on your approach. You might as well try to make it easier.

How do you know if you should quit?

Figure out the curve you’re on: are you in a Dip, on a Cliff, or at a Cul-de-Sac?

A Dip is a period of difficulty on a curve of progress

A Cliff is a curve of something addictive and seemingly positive, right up to the point that it isn’t. (like cigarette smoking)

A Cul-de-Sac are those situations where you’re just stuck, and no amount of hard work or grit would get you anywhere. Naturally, if you’re in a Cliff or a Cul-de-Sac, quitting is a good idea

Others (your friends and family) will know if you're heading towards a cliff. But only you know if you're in a cul-de-sac

If you quit, will it increase your ability to get through the Dip on something more important?

You should quit if you don’t see a path to becoming the ‘best in the world’ … for some definition of ‘world’

B. Dealing with burnout

You can manage to start developing burnout symptoms, never actually burn out if you deal with the symptoms early

Burnout is a kettle. Like any self-adjusting system you could keep it going by letting steam out occasionally. Constant self-monitoring has proven very useful. The knowledge that there’s a kettle inside you is half the battle.

Two techniques:

1. Detection

Detection is really easy. Once a week, introspect and ask yourself: “Do I feel resentful?” This works remarkably well, because resentment is the first sign of burnout. Feelings of resentment build over the long term, and sometimes your answer might be “a little, I’m alright” and then a few weeks pass and it’s “red alert, omfg I hate myself and I’m resentful of my work.”

First your job demands too much of you, then you feel anxious and emotionally exhausted, then you cope by becoming cynical about work, and then you quit

Make sure you never become cynical. Introspect a lot.

2. Corrective Action

Do restful activities once you've detected early signs of resentment. And things that are actually restful. Hiking, vacationing etc. Not reading a shit ton of new books and doing side projects

C. Only do things for which your enthusiasm half-life is high

It’s harder to burn out when you’re seeing success. Success ameliorates the pain of low enthusiasm. You can keep going for much longer when you see traction, when your revenue graphs are up and to the right. Though, again, this is only up to a certain point. Most founders wear out after a decade of hard execution.

Burning the boats (scary and not sustainable)

In theory, enthusiasm half-life is a static value, attached to a project, tied to our interests, abstracted away from the context in which execution occurs. In practice, motivation is a little elastic. Burning your boats — whether symbolically or otherwise — appears to be a rather effective way of extending your half-life

A better model for motivation

The Nature of Procrastination

Value — how much you enjoy doing the task, and how much you’ll enjoy the reward from completing the task.

Expectancy — how much you expect to succeed at doing the task, and how much you expect to acquire the reward.

Impulsiveness — how likely you are to be distracted given your environment or your history (personality, energy levels, genetics, whatever), and how good you are at staying focused.

Delay — the further away the task’s reward or completion, the lower the motivation.

Focus on things that bring you a lot of intrinsic value, and that have a "worth-it" reward at the end. And you'll end up being a lot more intrinsically motivated

D. Shipping

Shipping is a skill. Build it. To do this:

1. Always consider your users

Shipping a product is just like throwing a dinner party. And yet — for some weird reason — most of the principles we instinctively do when we’re preparing a dinner go right out the window when we’re trying to build and ship a product

For instance: do you prepare peanut dishes when you have a dinner guest with peanut allergies? Of course not! Similarly, when you’re building your thing, don’t just focus on making — focus also on asking the important questions:

What do these people like?

What do they need?

What would be the worst fit for them?

What drives them crazy?

Implication: the best products to start shipping are tightly focused ones. Don’t write a book titled ‘Everything You Need To Know About Consulting’; write a book titled ‘Double Your Freelancing Rate in 14 Days’.

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It’s much easier to write for a specific audience pain-point, and it takes far less time to complete.

2. Set a deadline ... and mean it

You’re probably not going to hit your deadline at first. You’re probably going to be a little bit late, or perhaps a whole lot late. But just setting a deadline and taking it seriously will force you to make significant progress.

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Deadlines aren’t a flexing of arbitrary power. Deadlines are a tool to help you get what you want.

With two caveats:

You must really want to finish the project you’ve set a deadline on.

You should follow the rest of the techniques in the book, which will replace ‘The Pressure’ of deadlines with constant, measurable progress.

3. Work Backwards

We do backward math all the time: if a roast takes eight hours, we know to start cooking eight hours before the dinner party starts. Which means ingredient prep has to start an hour beforethose eight hours! And on it goes

When it comes to projects, however, we tend to forget our dinner party planning. We finish a unit of work and then look forward, asking ourselves “ok, what next?” This is incredibly bad

For a project, you should start from the completed product, and then work backwards, asking:

What’s the end result look like, exactly?

How many chapters/videos/features?

What is absolutely required, what’s nice to have?

How perfect does it have to be?

How long will each of these take?

What has to come first?

What do I need to prepare?

How long will that take?

What do I need to find out?

How long will that take?

How much, or how little, defines success? And who controls that?

4. Break it into pieces

Don’t do multiple things at a time. Box yourself in to focus only on the individual components. This accomplishes two things: it allows you to focus, and it gives you the joy of accomplishment at completing one component in a single sitting. This joy keeps motivation high, and allows you to make continued forward progress.

5. Get Crispy

Get crispy means get specific, vivid, detailed. Crispy things have hard edges, and the hard edges are how you know you’re done

Hoy argues that when you’re outlining the work for your backwards plan, you should get crispy with every stage of the product:

DON’T write a book “about consulting”. DO focus on a specific crispy problem: “Get Clients Now”.

DON’T call your app “user friendly”. DO explain that your new customer could “Log time with 4 key strokes”.

DON’T promise that “you’ll learn CSS.” DO offer, “How to use the new flexbox module to get exactly the layout you want.”

If you’re specific with every stage of your product — from product definition all the way down to specifications for each feature — you’ll find that you’ll be more likely to finish the product and ship.

6. Start small

The way to JFS is to start small. If shipping is a skill, then learning that skill implies that it’s doable to practice on smaller, easier projects first. Plus, getting wins under your belt is how you gain the motivation to try on ever more ambitious projects!

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Don’t set out to build a huge web app on day 1. Write about the problem space. Do drawings. Create a small library. Create & ship a single feature app (like a micro-site). You’ll learn a lot about what it’s like to work with complete independence, and if you play your cards right, even your writing and your single-feature app could be very useful to your future users. You can always roll it into a bigger app later. You don’t lose a thing.

7. Cut without remorse

Hoy argues: shipping is what makes a product a product. A non-product, hidden away from the world, helps nobody. It’s virtually worthless. But if you ship it, there’s the possibility that you can help someone — even just a single person!

Hoy urges you to accept reality: life will interfere with your plans. You will have to choose what features to leave out, and you will have to cut.

8. Managing your psychology

You won't face fear. Instead you'll face uncertainty.

Uncertainty about what to do. Easy to solve with a crispy backwards plan

Uncertainty about your ability. Easy to solve if you just try and find out

Uncertainty about other people's reaction. Who cares?

Facts are better than feelings. The truth is that these feelings are lies that tricky you. The facts are far more encouraging: Everybody starts off sucking and must work to get better.

Just make sure that shipping something doesn't cause you harm in the worst-case scenario and you're good to go