Scott Porad

If I’ve said that once, I’ve said it a million times.  It is one of my mantras: success begets success.

1.  A little bit of success keeps me wanting more.

2.  A little bit of success motivates me to keep on going when times are tough.

3.  Planning for little bits of success is a tool that helps me break overwhelming jobs into manageable and achievable tasks.

4.  Breaking big jobs into little tasks helps me remember that it’s just a temporary setback, as opposed to the whole effort failing, when one thing doesn’t go well.

5.  It’s easier to start a big, overwhelming project when I break it up into little pieces and smaller tasks.  Then, I go back to step #1.

6.  Rinse, lather, repeat.

Last summer, I wrote a popular post about 3 Lessons I Learned About Development While Raking the Yard with My Son.  Welcome back again to Lessons from the Yard, Volume II.

I used to make big plans for the yard.  On a sunny weekend day in the spring I’d be inspired to go to the garden store and buy all sorts of supplies.  An entire spring and summer’s worth of supplies.  Plants and flowers.  Soil and compost.  Tools and equipment.

Oh, how I love to buy tools and equipment!  Tools and equipment are the romance of the garden store.  Tools and equipment fill my heart with songs of possibility and joy.

But I digress…

I would spend lots of money, then go home and unload the car.  By now it was lunchtime, so I’d go inside for something to eat, then head back out to begin turning my big plans into reality.  After a few hours I would get lé tired, so I’d start wrapping up and be done with an afternoon’s work by around 5pm or so.

Everything seems to be okay, so then what’s wrong with this picture?

The answer is that I used only about 1/10th of the garden supplies I bought earlier in the day.  Now, in theory, I would use the remainder of the supplies over the course of the summer, but let’s be honest…we all know that isn’t what happens.  What happens is that the sad little garden supplies are shuffled off into the garage where they dream of being called off the bench one day to play in the big leagues.

Not only was this wasteful, but it made me feel awful too.  Looming over my head all summer was the work that remained to be completed; looming was the failure of not having completed my job.

So, now I do things differently: when I go to the garden store I only buy enough supplies for the work I can complete that day.

Yes, that means more trips to the garden store which some would view is less efficient, and efficiency is revered in our culture.  I think it’s worth the trade-off because the other side of efficiency is effectiveness and my new method is much more effective.

Obviously, it’s less wasteful.  I only buy what I need, and don’t end up putting a bunch of supplies in the garage that never end up getting used.  And, more importantly, it makes me happier.  Instead of feeling the weight of work that remains to be completed, I feel the satisfaction of a job completed.

Obviously, these lessons could be applied to the work world as well, and I’m not the first person to state them.  Pretty much, we’re talking Lean.  Like raking pine cones last year, it’s just nice to feel these experiences while digging in the dirt.

I had coffee this morning with a friend who is looking for work.  (He’s a great guy…10 years at Amazon.com…if you’re looking for someone, let me know!)

As we talked, we came to the subject of “job listings” which are so impersonal.  For a professional, they feel like a pretty bogus way of getting a job.  Or, at least, uncertain and unreliable.

Of course, my thought was that it’s all about who you know…networking.  Essentially, my view is that personal relationships are what will lead to the next opportunity.

After coffee, I came into the office, was reading the paper, and came across David Brooks’ most recent column that addresses the impacts of the recession on people:

Recessions test social capital. If social bonds are strong, nations can be surprisingly resilient. If they are weak, things are terrible. The U.S. endured the Great Depression reasonably well because family bonds and social trust were high. Russia, on the other hand, was decimated by the post-Soviet economic turmoil because social trust was nonexistent.

Brooks illustrates my point in a macro-way, and both of us are simply expressing the point Lisa made when she said people and relationships keep you safe.

Finally, Brooks writes about the impact that social media has on the situation:

Facebook is great, but social networking sites do not by themselves create support networks when jobs disappear and poverty looms.

and notice the exact words he uses: “support networks”.  A “support network” is something different than a “social network”.  The support network is what we’re really talking about here.

Randy, as he often does, sent me some articles recently…this time related to the speculated arrival of an Apple tablet computing device.

We have some big plans for Cheezburger in the coming year, and there’s a lesson to be learned from these articles, in particular one from Daring Fireball:

I have a thousand questions about The Tablet’s design…but there’s one question at the top of the list, the answer to which is the key to answering every other question. That question is this: If you already have an iPhone and a MacBook; why would you want this?

The epigraph I used to start this piece — the bit about Steve Jobs demanding that a tablet be useful for more than just reading on the can — indicates that Apple will release nothing without such an answer. I agree that such an answer is essential.

This jibes a point that I’ve been highlighting lately: we can develop software faster than we can figure out what we want to build.

These days, with the evolution of web technologies, the problem isn’t exactly figuring out how to do something, but what exactly to do.  What is the thing that we’re going to build?  Answering that question clearly is the “essential” element to which Gruber refers.  It’s the clear answer to that which leads to success.

In fact, that’s what Gruber goes onto explain…not why someone would want it, but rather what exactly it is going to be in relation to other products.

When I think about Cheezburger, and the plans we have for the year ahead, that’s our biggest challenge in web development these days—what is it that we’re building and why would someone want it—everything else flows from there.

Following up on yesterday’s post about how to make successful New Years Resolutions, I wanted to add some wisdom from the Agile community.

As background, Agile is a software development methodology.  One part of Agile is that you take a big project and break it up into little pieces.  (Have you heard this before?  The journey of a thousand miles takes a million steps.)  Agile refers to each of these little pieces as “stories”.

INVEST is a heuristic for writing good stories.  In other words, it’s a way to effectively break the big journey up into little pieces.  What is INVEST?

• Independent
• Negotiable
• Valuable
• Estimable
• Small
• Testable

Let me try to illustrate each of these:

Independent — Make each goal independent of your others goals.  Simply put, creating dependencies makes things harder to achieve.

Negotiable — Don’t make your goals so specific that you’re locked into plans that can’t be made.  Be flexible.  Compare these examples, “I resolve to exercise for 60 minutes per week” versus “I resolve to exercise Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings for 20 minutes”.  Suddenly you’re too busy with work on Wednesday and now you’re beating yourself up for not keeping your resolution.

Valuable — One very good way of creating resolutions that will fail is to create resolutions that you don’t value.  Be honest with yourself: if you don’t care about improving your health, then you’re not going to exercise…neither “get in shape” or “go to the gym this week” will be successful resolutions.

Estimable — If you can’t figure out what it’s going to take to achieve the goal, then it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to find the time to do it.  When can you schedule “get in shape” on your calendar…between 5-6 on Tuesday?  Unlikely.  “Go to the gym this week” can be estimated…it will take one hour, so it can be put on the calendar.

Small — If you read this space, you know I’m an advocate of smaller efforts resulting in greater success.  “Get in shape” is a big goal, but “go to the gym this week” is small.  Small goals can be achieved, crossed off a list, and feel good…it feels good to succeed…success begets success.

Testable — How will you test or confirm that you’ve achieved this goal?  “Get in shape”….what does that mean?  When have you achieved that?  “Go to the gym once per week” is very testable…you can prove to yourself and others that it has been achieved.  (Be careful—Testable can cross swords with Negotiable leading to pitfalls.)

Obviously, there is no perfect resolution, but INVEST provides good guidelines for creating resolutions that will succeed.

Randy just wandered into my office, as he often does, and made the comment:

I don’t make New Years Resolutions because they’re bound to fail.  Look at it outside—how can you resolve to start exercising when it looks like that!  Perhaps in May or June, but not now.  They should be Mid-Year Resolutions.

He has a point: the weather is seriously ugly today, but I don’t think that’s why New Years Resolutions fail.

New Years Resolutions fail because we try to complete the journey in a single step.  After weeks, months or years of sitting on the couch, we resolve to “exercise daily and lose 20 pounds”.  Yeah, right…I’m sure that’s going to happen.

No, it’s not.  Let’s be honest with ourselves: that New Years Resolution is bound to fail, almost for certain.  You know the resolution that will succeed, try this:

Since I haven’t exercised in [weeks, months, years], I’m going to go to the gym once this week.

Now, that, my friends, is a resolution that will succeed!  It is specific and achievable, and small enough that know that you can fit it into your busy schedule.

If I have said it once, I have said it a thousand times: the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.  Resolve to take the first step.  Don’t resolve to complete the journey, resolve to get it started.

At Cheezburger, we embrace incrementalism.  We’ve found that when we make changes in incremental, small pieces and there are several benefits:

1. Things get done and ship faster.  The result is regular progress and momentum.  Success begets success.
2. Things tend to be less late.  It’s hard to have a 2 day project be 2 months late.
3. You get the thing your making out to your customers faster.  As a result, a) you start learning if it works sooner, b) your customers get to start using it sooner, and c) assuming it’s valuable, you start capturing the value sooner.
4. There is less overhead (design, planning, etc.) in a 2 day project than a 2 month project.
5. Incremental changes have fewer dependencies.  Dependencies add complexity and can cause delays.
6. Developers like small projects because they seem easier and more fun.
7. A small project has less bugs and is easier to test.
8. It’s easier to A/B test incremental changes.
9. It’s less expensive to change your mind because changes cost less.
10. Incremental changes are less jarring to customers.

The bottom line is that we’ve found greater success through incrementalism.  I’m sure there are 101 other reasons that I’ve missed too  (and I’d love for you to share them in the comments…yes, I’m speaking to you Martin).

Lately I’ve been thinking: what is the difference between an optimist and a pessimist?  The answer lies in how they deal with adversity.

When an optimist faces a setback, a loss, or a failure they look at the specific situation and consider the setback temporary. It’s no matter, they think…next time will be a success.

In the same situation, a pessimist thinks of the setback as permanent and global.  I’ll never be able to do this, they think…I’m doomed.

When I’m feeling down—and let’s be honest, we all feel down from time-to-time—I remind myself: global and permanent versus specific and temporary, that’s the difference.

Then, I try to change my outlook by looking for the specific and temporary aspects of the situation.  When I am able to do this effectively, it feels really good.  I feel better knowing that clouds will pass and sunny days will come again.

A young man introduced himself to me after my presentation at BlogWorld Expo. We sat down to talk and he explained that he was an engineer at an aerospace firm, but wants to get into blogging…

…he was at BlogWorld to learn and explore options…a blog, a podcast, a video podcast…he was trying to figure out what the best thing to do…to figure out something that had the greatest chance of success given the amount of time he could put forth as a side-project…

…after learning about Cheezburger from my presentation, he considered user-generated content…perhaps it would be easier to identify quality content as opposed to generate it. “Maybe that would work,” he wondered aloud.

Until this point, I listened. New to the world of blogging and social media, his mind was brimming with new ideas. I could see the gears turning as he worked out this thoughts aloud. But, when he said the phrase, “that would work” I jumped in.

“There is only one thing that works,” I said, being really forward. “Do you want to know what it is?”  Dramatic pause.

The only thing that works is doing the something you love.

Whatever you choose to do, it’s going to be hard. At first, there will be very few people paying attention, if any, and it’s unlikely that you’re going to make any money.

You have to do something that makes you happy all by itself; something that you enjoy enough that you’ll done it for free.  Inevitably there are going to be tough times, and as I’ve written before, if you’re not passionate about your project then you won’t persevere because your heart won’t be in it.

Recently I exchanged e-mail with a friend who has a relatively successful blog in his space.  However, it’s a side-project to his day job in an unrelated field, and he would like to find a way to turn the blog into his full-time employment.

The issue, he said, was that he didn’t have enough time to do the things to the blog that he wants to do.  He felt stuck.

I’m a big believer that large accomplishments are achieved through many small successes.  Although the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step there is no mortal that can complete it in a single step.  In reality, the journey of a thousand miles takes a million steps.

With that in mind, my response was to turn the problem around:

What can you do with the time you have?

If all you need to do to move toward your goal is make some small accomplishment, then there must be something that can be done with the available time.