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I think you may have slightly misunderstood the article.

"Preparation" isn't mentioned explicitly, but by my reading it would come firmly under "is not doing the thing".

Getting everyone to fall in love with the thing is not doing the thing... learned this as a data scientist brought in to work on a project which ended soon thereafter. A team of 20 people spent 1.5 years getting people to love an idea which never materialized. Time was wasted because the technical limitations and issues came too late... it died as a 40 page postmortem that will never see daylight.

I learned that lesson as a solo dev on a project that lasted a year, then learned it again as a team of 4 on a 2-year project. I've not had to learn the lesson again but I've certainly trod the same path... 20 people (including some VERY expensive contractors), 3.5 years, AU$80m to deliver what amounts to a timesheeting system that needs a team of 10 people manually massaging the data every month to make it work.

How do you not be "toxic" after that? How do you retain a chipper attitude when you know for a rock-solid certainty that even if the project is successful it's likely by accident?

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