How to do anything
justinkan.com
justinkan.com
Mark Twain
And while you really can't necessarily achieve anything this way, you can make progress. So if you decide to say mine minerals on the moon, you can start making progress toward that but it may be that you never do find a ride up and back.
No that is not how you apply this quote, to going to the moon. If wish to go to the moon, you break down the tasks of going there and coming back into smaller pieces and execute smaller set of tasks.
"Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs." - Henry Ford
Of course if a tool could keep track of changes as the project progresses (along with a change log of reasons for each task add/removal), then it could be a good resource improve your estimation skills.
It's very configurable and works well with Dropbox .
You can do anything you set your mind to if you have infinite time (and money/other resources). As a thought experiment if you are an immortal billionaire with perfect health, you can do anything you want.
Fitting a plan (to successfully complete audacious goals) into a context of limited resources is the real challenge. This is why startups talk of 'runways' and scrounge for funding.
(that said, breaking things down into smaller steps is useful)
This may be too simplistic, but lets take your quarterback problem. Let's assume you are able bodied, in shape, in high school (gotta start then if you want to make it to the pros) and made the football team.
1. You made the team 2. You become back up quarter back 3. Work your ass off at training to become starting QB or at least when he goes down you get a chance to show why you should be starting. 4. You become starting QB 5. You work your ass off to make plays, win games, and become recognized not only as a great QB but also as a great leader, because the QB is the leader of the team. 6. Get accepted into a recognized college and repeat the above.
All you have to do is follow the guidelines set by yourself, fill in the blanks, and repeat. I do not mean to go on a tangent, but the point I am trying to convey is everything you want to accomplish in life can be done if you bust your ass once someone somewhere gives you a chance to do so.
It's easy to forget, though, that my job as a software developer is to solve small problems all day in order to tackle a larger problem, and that not everyone has this day-to-day experience. So outside of our tribe, this article may not be as 'common sensical' as I first presumed.
i think the point is to apply it to things you know you can accomplish but don't know how or feel overwhelmed by.
flying to pluto is also impossible, let's not use this as a counterexample as to why you shouldn't start a company or change your car's alternator or build a bookshelf.
[1]: The only difficulty is when you encounter a combinatorial explosion of potential solutions. It will work eventually, but it might take too long.
1. Learn about what's going on in the world.
2. Make a list of the most interesting things you might want to change...Breaking down problems, step by step, into smaller digestible pieces allows self confidence when you can check on task off a list. It allows you to tackle one facet of the problem and stack layers of knowledge. I think the problem with most things is "paralysis by analysis"; you see a problem, say a start up idea, that you want to do but you have no idea how. You get too involved in the minutia of things and become paralyzed before you ever start.
Another great line: "I recall a disagreement I had with a friend many years ago. My claim was that anything I set my mind to was achievable; he thought this idea was ridiculous"
Not only is this a great line, because you REALLY can accomplish anything you set your mind to, but it is also a fundamentally different way to look at the world. You see obstacles for what they are; obstacles. You don't see them as a reason why you can't do something.
The more obstacles in your way, the more reason why you have found something worth your time doing. Obstacles let you know what you're doing is important, worthwhile, and because it has obstacles you have already beat at least 50% of the people out there because they will likely give up when presented with a challenge that they do not know how to solve.
Great article.
Daniel Pink's latest book To Sell is Human helped brings up another interesting aspect of this. He highlights a study in the book where people were able to get more things, I believe it was puzzles, accomplished when they got themselves into a questioning mindset.
you mean "The War of Art" (by Pressfield) not the "Art of War" (by Sun Tzu)
Many people have set their mind to things and failed. Many have done so and succeeded.
Either case is clearly better than being overwhelmed into motionless atrophy.
I think building a (successful) start-up is a lot like getting a PhD. You make a bump on the circle at some point: http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/
I've said this before, and I don't think it's any big secret, but the silly questions you hear in interviews almost never care about getting the right answer, but test to see if you can work a process to at least get to a plausibly believable answer. Or at least that's what I've always looked for when interviewing.
I remember asking a guy "How many jellybeans can you fit into a school bus?", and he started working the problem out. He guessed at the dimensions of a jelly bean, then asked me something about how many cubic feet are in the interior of a school bus, then began working out the problem mathematically.
This was exactly the right process, at least by my estimation, though there were other really interesting ways people approached the problem. A surprisingly large number of people just said "I don't know", without bothering to go any further, and one guy even got mad at us being one of those "stupid puzzle shops" and left in a hurry.
The reason I remember the one guy though, was because at the end, he asked me something like "I think the answer is such and such, with an approximate margin of error of 10% or so. How close am I?" When I confessed that I had no idea what the answer was, and that I was really just looking to see how he came up with the process, he laughed louder than I've ever heard anyone laugh ever before. I told him his guess was likely closer than anything I might have come up with on my own, and we eventually hired him and he proved to be great.
The skills necessary for good problem solving are myriad, but at least to me (and apparently Justin Kan), it starts with breaking problems down into bite-sized chunks. Another big thing for me (that I didn't see in the article) is in asking questions for things you don't know. Nobody knows everything, and I've found that the best engineers I've worked with have always been pretty systematic about clarifying things they weren't clear on. That's huge too. If you need to know whether we're talking short bus, field trip bus or regular old school bus, ask. An answer for one is probably not the answer for another.
Correction.
This is how most puzzle based interviews are supposed to be done, but aren't.
In order to manage this personally, I use Workflowy (http://workflowy.com), which is a good semantic representation of nested to-do lists, which is essentially what you are creating for this process. Yes, my Workflowy contains hundreds of small tasks. They aren't necessarily executed in order.
And for those who want a quick heads up. Continue reading...
The crux of the issue is that the human brain is not good at storing thing like lists, or lists of lists or lists of lists of lists .. ad infinitum. The problem gets more complicated when you to manage these list structures in your brain. Its very difficult to do this to-do, done, priority and triaging etc activities in your brain itself. Chances are that, if you put all that stuff in your head you will- Either forget most of them and focus what you brain thinks is the highest priority(which most of the times disastrously ends up in a task called 'procrastination') or that your mind will spend great deals of time, energy and psychic resources to maintain those list structures. The net result is much resources are spent maintaining that list structures than executing them. This is when you get that overwhelming feeling of 'I am stressed' or 'There are too many things to do, I cant take it anymore' emotions.
What is the result?- you either mess up real badly forgetting things or get overwhelmed and give up.
There are a few exceptions to these cases. During the times of crisis/interesting-situations your brain does a superb job of prioritizing things and putting all the focus on one most important task at hand. This is the reason why when your life is in danger or when you start work on a very interesting project you brain automagically tells you to do tasks X, Y and Z without even you consciously knowing about it. A few more exceptions to this are moments of 'Flow', when you are in a moment of 'Flow'[1], when you experience flow you will not need a list set up to help you out. But you will need GTD to get into 'Flow'[2].
To summarize it all:
1. Your brain needs a purge from time to time.
2. You need some way of maintaining task state outside
your brain. My advice is use a diary and pen/pencils.
3. You need to visualize things. Not just your schedule.
I mean everything. Even if its a simple program you are
writing, put it down on a paper first. Visualize it.
4. I repeat. Purge your brain. Put things down on paper
first.
5. Make plans, break them down and execute.
6. Pick interesting projects. Helps in getting into
'Flow'.
7. REVIEW THE PROGRESS OF YOUR PLANS(without this its
all useless)
8. Ponder on the 'Next task' for every task you do.Basically, everything is doable if its broken down into small chunks. The methods for stuff that people have already done should be shared.