Sunday Snippets #5
do the obvious thing; slow is fake; take your plan and slam it into reality
Often the most direct solution to any problem is staring you in the face – if only you had the courage to actually do it.
There are many seemingly challenging problems that have very simple, direct solutions. The real challenge is how to become the kind of person who can implement the most direct solutions instead of having to take a circuitous path to compensate for laziness or timidity. This is why working on your personal development, especially building your courage and self-discipline, is one of the best problem-solving techniques there is.
I mentioned this in a previous post and it resonated with some of you, so I’m saying again: you already know exactly what you need to do. You just need to do it.
If you respond to your emails quickly instead of slowly, you’ll get access to more new opportunities, and end up prioritizing them over whatever you would have done instead.
If you make it 10x faster to test your code, you don’t just save time waiting on tests—you can start doing test-driven development, discover your mistakes earlier, and save yourself from going down bad paths.
If you deploy your new app now instead of next week, you’ll learn how users like the new features one week earlier, and you’ll be able to feed that knowledge back into future product decisions.
[M]oving quickly is an advantage that compounds. Being twice as fast doesn’t just double your output; it doubles the growth rate of your output. Over time, that makes an enormous difference.
At some point you have to stop planning and just dive in:
The way to end up with a good plan is not to start with a good plan, it's to start with some plan, and then slam that plan against reality until reality hands you a better plan.
I originally read this phrase on Nat Eliason’s website.