Just Get Started: The Power of Momentum

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer podcast, where we work on getting better step by step professionally and personally. Let's get started. Well, hello and welcome back. We are going to talk today about how to get going. This is one of the things that we have seen, again, with a lot of the conversations and all the interviews we've been covering. One of the things that goes back to actually in sort of a classic line, when somebody goes through an MBA program, a master's in business, one of the things they do is they have a essentially a like, it's really it's a business plan that they put together. That's sort of like the culmination of their degree. It's very common. So there's always this like business plan course or class or, you know, capstone project. And one of the things about the business plan project is there's a common saying that the business plan that is most likely succeed is the one that actually gets executed. That that's one of the problems is that people have these great business plans and they never actually execute them. That is exactly what we're going to talk about today. It could be the, you know, the Nike slogan of just do it, but it's really that's what it boils down to is look at what you've got as far as, you know, your plans, your maybe your strategy, some of your skills, some of the scheduling and things like that that you've done to put yourself in a position to maybe start a business, go into a side hustle. It's easy to talk ourselves out of that, particularly when we haven't done it. When we're just getting started out, we don't really have that forward momentum. We don't have something that's telling us, hey, we did this yesterday, so we're going to do it again today because that's just part of what we do. That is the momentum that I refer to fairly regularly. And that's why the goal is really to just get started. And we've talked about some great examples. For example, just like if you want to write a book, start by writing, you know, 30 minutes a day or 15 minutes a day or five minutes a day. If you want to get going, you got to start somewhere. You have to take that first step. The cool thing is that once you take that first step, the next step is easier to take than the one before it. And it actually continues like that for quite a while. So if you can get one day in a row of doing something, of working towards your goal, and then the next day you get one day in a row, but now it's a second time. So now you have two days in a row, and the day after that you go three days in a row. When you can get to seven days in a row, then you've just put together a week of progress towards your goal, towards your objective. Now the challenge with this, of course, is where do I take that first step? And again, this is one of those recurring themes, is instead of trying to focus on the big picture, on the big win, on winning that race, you have to start with something that is doable and measurable really in a reasonable amount of time. Reasonable being maybe 15 minutes or 30 minutes or maybe 15 minutes across four days or something like that. You have to get your big thing, your big project broken down into at least actionable steps that you can take on a regular basis. If you want to, for example, let's take something big, like if you wanted to win the Super Bowl and you're on a team, okay you've gotten that far, you're on a professional football team, and you want to win the Super Bowl, the first thing you have to do is you've got to play the games to get there. And before that, you have to practice so that you have a good chance of winning the games. That's the same thing. We run into this stuff where we say, oh, I want to have my own business and be able to quit my job. Well, you're not going to do that overnight. There are logical steps you can take to get there. So it may be things like, hey, if you've started where I just said, like, I just want to have a business and want to be able to quit my job. That's very wide open. So from there, maybe your first step is, all right, what kind of business am I going to do? What is it that I enjoy doing? And these are the things that, to me, it's very fascinating that people don't get started and don't get moving and don't get that momentum going when some of these are, to me, very easy tasks or maybe not easy to complete as much as they are easy to get started on. It's pretty easy to sit down and say, all right, I'm going to think for 15 minutes, I'm going to just think about what is it that I want to do? What is it that I enjoy? And maybe I'm going to take some notes, write down a couple of things like this is what I'm enjoying. This is what I like to do. This is a, maybe this is a product that I think has legs or this is a service that I can provide that would allow me to support myself and my family and get away from my job. Or it's just, there's this problem that I see that I really want to help people solve. Those kinds of first steps are still critical and they are steps. They are getting you from, I don't know what I'm going to do or I'm very, let's say, I have a very wide and broad range of what I'm going to do and it gets you into that step of focusing, of saying, okay, yeah, I want to do all this stuff, but here's where I'm going to start. This is what I'm going to work on. It could be as a workout kind of analogy. It could be as simple as like, there's a difference between I'm going to go to the gym and being at the gym and picking a machine or exercise that you're going to do. You've made progress there. Each step of the way, you made progress in getting to the gym. You made progress selecting whatever the machine is or weights you're going to lift or whatever the action is, that exercise you're going to do. And then when you start doing it, you've taken another step. And if you want to really trigger the positive emotions around success, that's one of the ways you can do this is you can break this down into very small steps. Stuff that you can knock out in five or 10 or 15 minutes. And yes, there's going to come a point where you're going to have to, you're going to get to a point where there's just going to be bigger things you're going to have to do. So it's going to take a little longer from victory to victory. However, you can still pace yourself so that you can see maybe daily or almost definitely like weekly progress where you can celebrate. You say, hey, I got this done. And sometimes it may be as simple as I got 15 minutes of work on this thing done for a week straight. Hey, you know, take a victory lap because if you've never done that before, it is a victory. Even if you have done it before, it is still progress because even 15 minutes a day for a week, you're talking over an hour and a half that you've spent now towards that goal. And even if it sometimes happens, we spend a lot of time and then we realize that we essentially wasted our time because we went down the wrong path. That's okay. We've at least eliminated that path. And it allows us to reset and we can go back and say, okay, yeah, we took that wrong path, but now we know we're not going to do that again and we can move forward. Don't count it as much as a loss, as a learning experience. And so you spent the time invested in a path you don't want to take and now you are back on the actual path maybe. Now you're asking yourself probably, okay, cool, but now how does that help me? If it's writing a book, I think it's pretty, that's like, that can be very sort of obvious, we'll say, because it's like, oh, well, if you're going to write, then you're going to have to write a certain amount. And eventually, you know, if you write one word, you've made progress. If you write two words, you've doubled that progress. If you're creating a product or service, that's all different. Now, yes, if it's software, you can measure things like I wrote 15 lines of code or 100 lines of code or a function or two functions. And generally, that's actually a really good way to go from a creating a product point of view is look at it as either features, if the features are small enough, or maybe subsets of the feature. So for example, let's say that you are building just a customer relationship management application. So one of the things you're going to have to do is be able to display a list of customers, select a customer, edit a customer as far as like the data around them. You're going to be able to enter some data around them. But you could start something, something without even code and say, okay, what data do I need to track for a customer? That is progress. If you can go from, I don't know, to these are the fields that I'm going to track or these are the properties that I need to track, and in particular, these are the properties I need to track and these are roughly what they're going to look like. Like this is the data type or the length or how they relate to other things within my application. That's progress. And that's the kind of stuff that you can sit down and do 15 minutes a day and get going and make that progress. Now if you've been sitting here listening to all of these interviews for the last year, there's an incredible amount of information that we have. I know because I sat there through all of those multiple times, listened to them the first time and then I listened to them again as edited and put these things back out and you know set them up for an episode. Within all of these gems and nuggets that have been presented to us, it's great to know them but it's more important to be able to act on them. A key example, way early on, I had an extra conversation outside of an interview with one of the coaching type people and we talked about me potentially signing up with him and going into his coaching program and things like that. And as we're talking through it, it was enlightening, I guess I'll say to me, that I'm sitting here talking about here's the things that I need to do, here's what I'm expecting to get. And there was nothing really directly that he was giving me. So the coaching program was not stuff, I mean there was going to be things in there, it's like you know everything but there was a lot of core stuff there that I could do without going into his program. Now what was he going to give me was, you know, now you've got somebody, if you go in investing in this, you're investing in yourself, you've given yourself extra incentive to get the things done that you need to get done. Now going back to the start of this, it's about just do it. So if you know what to do and even if you sort of know what to do, so maybe you know that you need to create a product and you need to research the market and you need to figure out how you're going to market that product, you have to figure out a brand and all these things, that may seem like too much to do this week. And honestly it most likely is too much to do this week unless you have something that's very small and you're very quick at getting those things done. However, you can chop that up into little pieces and say, okay, I'm going to spend 15 minutes trying to figure out what my product name should be. Or maybe from there you spend 15 minutes on your product name and you realize I'm going to spend 15 minutes tomorrow figuring out what my service or my features are going to be. What is it that this is really going to do? Besides solve a big problem, I'm going to give them the solution. It's within giving them the solution, this is how I'm going to present the solution. So here's the features. Here's the functions that you're going to be allowed to have or that you're going to be given as part of the solution. These are the value points you're going to get from our service, whatever that happens to be. And those things, they have momentum in themselves. As I just gave you the example, as you may say, okay, I'm going to put a name to my product. But then in doing that exercise, spending that 15 minutes trying to figure out a name for your product, you're going to have things that would occur to you. Say, for example, okay, well, what is this product really going to do? How am I going to differentiate this from other products in the market or even if there are other products in the market? And so there's things where you're like, oh, I need to think about that. One of the other things, well, what about other products in the market? Oh, I need to spend some time on product research, on competition research and things like that. So these things that seem like very small tasks typically will spawn more small tasks. And you don't need to get frustrated with that because actually what you've done is you've made progress towards building out your overall list of things that need to get accomplished in order for you to cross that finish line. And a lot of times, particularly early on in a project or a product, it is amazing to me how much value you can get out of basically just sitting there and writing down notes. Like as simple as, I mean, you can be electronic and digital if you want, but as simple as a pencil and paper and starting to go through like, oh, I need to do this, I need to do that. Or these days maybe go check in AI and say, okay, well, what are some steps I should take to create a brand, to create this kind of a product, to market this kind of service, things like that. And you're going to get all kinds of answers back. So you'll get a list, but guess what? Now you have a list before you didn't. So victory, you know, jump up and down and go hooray because you made progress. You've gotten something accomplished. And that's something you can do in a reasonably short period of time. And then the nice thing is like we've talked about is there is momentum. These things can snowball. So a lot of times what will happen is you'll go through that first week, for example, and you get to the end of the week and you're like, wow, there's all this stuff I need to do. And if it's something you like that you enjoy, most likely you're going to say, I really want to do this. You're going to be chomping at the bit to get your 15 minutes in every day. Or you're going to get to that 15 minutes and you're going to be maybe pushed to continue as opposed to go on and doing something else. And again, I know this from experience. There's so many times that I've started out sort of, we'll say dreading getting to that thing, whatever it is that I'm starting, I get going on it. And the next thing you know, I'm trying to find ways to steal time to go focus on that product or that project or that service or that new growth director or whatever it is that I'm working on. And that's again, that goes back to our why. And that's very key. If this is something that you want to do, if this is something that you enjoy, if this is something that will lead you either gives you happiness or leads you to happiness, then there is going to be that inner motivation of I want to be happy. That's going to help you. But then also there's that motivation of, hey, I did this yesterday. I did it the day before. I made progress. Things are going well. You're going to want to continue it. You're not going to be hesitant about it. You're not going to have any fear about stepping into this next step or task because you have a long, you know, fairly soon, you have a long trail track record of success, of doing this exact same thing, of stepping into your task for the day, of getting it completed and realizing that you have now moved the ball forward in our one or more steps closer to your end objective. That, you know, old thing about a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. Well, if you are taking regular steps each day, then you are very quickly going to be seeing that thousand miles shrink because next thing you know, you're going to be at 999 miles and the 990 miles and 900 miles and 700 miles and five. And next thing you know, you're down to like, Oh, hey, I've got one more mile and I've just put 999 miles behind me. So I am not at all concerned about getting through that last mile. That is what we, when we talk about momentum, when we talk about just get started, that's it. That is what the magic to it is. If you look at every successful entrepreneur, one of the things that will distinguish them from so many failed entrepreneurs are that they actually tried it. There are a lot of people out there that have great ideas, great products, services, all kinds of things, problems that they can solve, but they've never actually really attempted it. And so they, you know, they, you can say, well, they didn't fail, but they sure as heck didn't succeed. And honestly, in a lot of cases, you're better off to try and fail because at least then you've eliminated that path and then you can adjust and you can try again. And eventually you will succeed. That's just sort of, you know, sooner or later, you're going to get there because you're going to learn because we all do through our failures, through our mistakes, through our missteps. We realize what we shouldn't do. And sometimes we're able to take with one failure, with one misstep. Sometimes there's maybe dozens or hundreds of other missteps that we now will not take because we say, oh, this thing is like all of these other steps that we took. So we can avoid all of those. We don't need to do that. You know, if you're driving a car and you have an accident because you were driving so fast, you lost control, then guess what? You're going to back off the speed quite a bit. And there's, you don't have to like, you know, if you crash it because you're moving a hundred and I'm in America, so 180 miles per hour, you don't have to go back and say, okay, I'm going to test it at 179 and then 178 and 177. You know that, oh, okay, I'm going to back it down quite a bit. So maybe I'm going to jump all the way back down to, you know, a hundred miles an hour is the limit. Well, now there's all of those steps in between that you don't have to worry about because you know those are close enough to the bad stuff that you can ignore that. So just getting started, even when it is a misstep, at the very least is going to give you one thing, one action, one step in a failure that you can say, okay, I'm not going to do that again. But that's actually worst case. More often than not, there's actually sort of a, we'll call it a family or a classification of things that you're going to learn from that misstep and say, okay, I can take out this group of potential directions or steps I was going to take that I'm not going to take those steps. And so now you've really moved towards success because you're starting to eliminate and sometimes in, you know, by leaps and bounds, you're going forward and eliminating obstacles and challenges and potential failures because you've got these successes and now you're starting to figure out where you're supposed to go and how you're going to get there and how does it work for you and how does it work for your customers? But you didn't get there if you didn't start. And so probably you're sitting there like so many of us have been where you have some level of desire. You want to do this. You have some product or service in your head. Maybe even more than that. You may have actually taken more steps than that, but somewhere around the way, it just basically floundered. Now it could be that you just, you just sort of like got busy or something like that and you just, you lost the momentum or it could be that you got stuck. But in either case, the way to move forward is to attempt to move forward, is to take a look at where you're at and just, and maybe the first day, all you really do is you're planning your first step. That may be your first step is really just thinking about your first step. As you're looking at what's your, where you're at and like, okay, well, what am I going to do to start? And don't think that just because you didn't, you went through today, if this is, you know, if you go through today and you're like, okay, I'm just going to think about what am I going to do tomorrow? Well, it doesn't mean today was wasted. It means that you actually put some thought into taking that first step, that you've spent some time planning and dissecting and analyzing and doing the things that we do when we're considering what that next step needs to be. So the bottom line is there's really no excuse not to get started. And right now, this is a little shorter. It's going to be a little shorter than our typical podcast episode. So if you're normally sitting there, wait, you know, sort of like chunked out a certain amount of time to listen to this, then guess what? I'm going to give you, you know, not a ton, but like five, 10 minutes-ish, depending on how you do it, closer to five minutes, that you're going to get back, that you're going to be able to go start on that thing. Whether you're doing an action or whether you're planning for that action that you're going to have tomorrow, just go out and do it. And then, you know, go ahead and pat yourself on the back and then tomorrow come back and do it again. That's all we got for you. So go out there, get something done, but then have a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Nor Podcast. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, anywhere that you can find podcasts. We are there. And remember, just a little bit of effort every day ends up adding into great momentum and great success. Hi, this is Rob from Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Nor Podcast. We're excited to be on Alexa now. You can enable us by simply saying, Alexa, enable Building Better Developers, and we will be there ready for you every time you want to listen to your now favorite podcast. Whether we are your favorite podcast or not, we would love to hear from you, so please leave a review on Amazon.